> Most of the problem I have it is with the imperialistic culture that came with it and with the serious security bugs that they keep sweeping under the rug.
The 'Imperialistic Culture' you speak of is one of those made-up things that systemd haters keep repeating, but has no basis in reality.
> They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting it be accepted by merits.
Again, another fairy tail.
> They have a track record of labeling serious bugs as non-issues, ignoring them, or just not filing them as CVEs. Serious issues keep coming up.
A) This is par for the course in Linux software. See also: Linux kernel. One side you have is a bunch of security bros running around trying to fluff up their resumes and trying to turn themselves into heros. And on the other side you have devs working hard on various features and bugs and being resentful that most of their work goes unnoticed while stuff they already fixed is thrown back in their face.
B) Many of the bugs that make it onto Reddit/Hacker news are going to be ones that are largely changes in configuration defaults or behaviors that break things and are meant to be configured by the operating system designers that use it, not end users.
C) This level of scrutiny never existed before for low-level Linux features. The multitude of redundent and terrible shell scripts that made up the majority of functionality that systemd project seeks to replace was always a swampy mess of broken functionality and bad code. Having each and every major linux distribution rewriting 90% of it from scratch in a completely un-portable and estoric way didn't help matters.
Linux advocates actually went so far as to praising the fact that even though half of the scripts in their OS were completely broken and the OS still worked fine was a testament to it's robustness.
The fact that now, finally, after decades of this crap people can now track bugs related to low-level Linux userland 'plumbing' is actually a good thing.
> It is easier to configure and is convenient to have one holistic system in a lot of ways, but...
On the sysvinit side you had thousands and thousands of lines bunch of procedural code of dubious quality that is endlessly rewritten by hundreds of different teams with vastly differing levels of competency and success using a general purpose language for configuration. It was so unportable that you couldn't even use anything but the most basic and trivial (also broken) init scripts from one distribution to another without herculean levels of effort.
On the other side you have a even driven OS configuration and management engine that allows people to describe the state they want the OS to be in via a domain specific configuration language. It has managed to standardize the low level plumbing for Linux operating systems and allows distributions to share improvements with one another in a way that was previously impossible.
If people want a alternative to gain in popularity they need learn what systemd does and understand why Linux distribution makers switched to it. Then produce something of their own that takes those positive features and improves on it further.
All the hand waiving about 'Imperialism via releasing open source software to the public' is infantile.
The upside of all of this is that it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to make systemd unit files portable then it is to make Linux init shell scripts. There isn't any reason why a more capable init system wouldn't be able to parse existing unit files and know then how to start and manage the services and applications that use them... So the effort to move away from systemd should be significantly less then the effort to move to systemd.
> On the other side you have a even driven OS configuration and management engine
You are repeating the there-is-only-sysvinit-and-systemd fallacy, pointed out years ago by the Uselessd Guy and decried by many others since but (alas!) still going strong today in this very discussion, and ironically you are doing it whilst erroneously ascribing things to systemd that it was intentionally designed not to be. systemd was explicitly designed not to be an event-driven system. The wholly event-driven system was Upstart, and in practice it turned out to be a problem. Lennart Poettering xyrself discussed the problem, as did some of the Debian Technical Committee members during the Debian Hoo-Hah.
You're really not refuting anything here. Whatever bad situation existed with previous startup across, it doesn't excuse bad handling of issues in systemd. Whatever other projects do with CVEs, doesn't excuse Lennart complaining that CVEs should not be raised.
The imperialism part is likely due to score creep into parts they just can't handle well enough. systemd-resolved for example had terrible security and functionality issues still after it was being deployed to many distros. These were simple "point a fuzzer at it and watch it crash" issues which should not be seen in a DNS resolver these days.
> Many of the bugs that make it onto Reddit/Hacker news are going to be ones that are largely changes in configuration defaults or behaviors that break things and are meant to be configured by the operating system designers that use it, not end users.
Maybe it's not for systemd to decide what I'm meant to do. If changes to behavior that they only meant for operating system maintainers to rely on results in angry end-users, they probably made the wrong assumption.
> On the sysvinit side you had thousands and thousands of lines bunch of procedural code of dubious quality that is endlessly rewritten by hundreds of different teams with vastly differing levels of competency and success using a general purpose language for configuration.
Meanwhile, I have ~400 LOC of init scripts (including service scripts) on my daily driver, an init system with <1% the LOC of systemd, and plain text readable system logs. I agree that hand waving about "imperialism" isn't very constructive, but on the other hand I don't think that misrepresenting the alternatives to systemd and exaggerating their faults is particularly useful either, nor is pretending that sysvinit is the only alternative. A lot of people have thought "sysvinit sucks" and done something about it.
At the end of the day it is the handling and haptics that count. So let me give you some anecdotical experience. A few weeks ago when the new Fedora came out i tried it as a live system from usb keychain, out of curiosity. It was the xfce live respin. Anyways, long story short, clicked around for a while, wasn't impressed much, shut it down. Flicker, flicker, the usual console messages scrolled by, and then it was stuck trying to unmount somesuch yadda yadda yarr yarr... for minutes. I wasn't in a hurry and waited, curious
WHAT would happen. Nothing, just finally powering off after 2,5 to 3 minutes. I sat there and wondered: could it really be THAT slow? Was my usb-stick slow? Nope. Tried another stick, another laptop, even some other respins. Always the same. Dumbstruck of the audacity of the so called leader in Linux i just thought to myself that they must be on crack or
some other bad stuff. Because when i tried a few other systemd-free live systems on the same sticks and hardware everything just whooshed by. Why is that? Are they living in
a parallel universe? Do i have outliers in terms of hardware? At least in one case i don't think so because it is a very well supported Thinkpad which accepts almost anything i can throw at it, and the other a similar HP Elite Book. So there is that. Now what?
The 'Imperialistic Culture' you speak of is one of those made-up things that systemd haters keep repeating, but has no basis in reality.
> They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting it be accepted by merits.
Again, another fairy tail.
> They have a track record of labeling serious bugs as non-issues, ignoring them, or just not filing them as CVEs. Serious issues keep coming up.
A) This is par for the course in Linux software. See also: Linux kernel. One side you have is a bunch of security bros running around trying to fluff up their resumes and trying to turn themselves into heros. And on the other side you have devs working hard on various features and bugs and being resentful that most of their work goes unnoticed while stuff they already fixed is thrown back in their face.
B) Many of the bugs that make it onto Reddit/Hacker news are going to be ones that are largely changes in configuration defaults or behaviors that break things and are meant to be configured by the operating system designers that use it, not end users.
C) This level of scrutiny never existed before for low-level Linux features. The multitude of redundent and terrible shell scripts that made up the majority of functionality that systemd project seeks to replace was always a swampy mess of broken functionality and bad code. Having each and every major linux distribution rewriting 90% of it from scratch in a completely un-portable and estoric way didn't help matters.
Linux advocates actually went so far as to praising the fact that even though half of the scripts in their OS were completely broken and the OS still worked fine was a testament to it's robustness.
The fact that now, finally, after decades of this crap people can now track bugs related to low-level Linux userland 'plumbing' is actually a good thing.
> It is easier to configure and is convenient to have one holistic system in a lot of ways, but...
On the sysvinit side you had thousands and thousands of lines bunch of procedural code of dubious quality that is endlessly rewritten by hundreds of different teams with vastly differing levels of competency and success using a general purpose language for configuration. It was so unportable that you couldn't even use anything but the most basic and trivial (also broken) init scripts from one distribution to another without herculean levels of effort.
On the other side you have a even driven OS configuration and management engine that allows people to describe the state they want the OS to be in via a domain specific configuration language. It has managed to standardize the low level plumbing for Linux operating systems and allows distributions to share improvements with one another in a way that was previously impossible.
If people want a alternative to gain in popularity they need learn what systemd does and understand why Linux distribution makers switched to it. Then produce something of their own that takes those positive features and improves on it further.
All the hand waiving about 'Imperialism via releasing open source software to the public' is infantile.
The upside of all of this is that it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to make systemd unit files portable then it is to make Linux init shell scripts. There isn't any reason why a more capable init system wouldn't be able to parse existing unit files and know then how to start and manage the services and applications that use them... So the effort to move away from systemd should be significantly less then the effort to move to systemd.