Isn't that a selfish view, though? "Works for me,so I don't care that systemd is creating dependencies everywhere for everyone else".
I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives.
Isn't linux about choice? It feels we're going on a downwards spiral where choice is being taken away from us in every domain
> I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives.
You can? The system where I'm writing this uses systemd, yet networking is handled by NetworkManager and not systemd-networkd. Time keeping is handled by chrony and not systemd-timesyncd (or whatever the systemd NTP client was called). Etc. Systemd in fact has many components that are optional. Of course, there are also parts of it that are non-optional, just like many other collections of related software.
> Isn't linux about choice?
Linux is "about choice" to the extent that the source code is freely available, and if you don't like what upstream is doing, you have the choice to fork it and do whatever you want. "Linux is about choice" does not extend to upstream maintainers being obligated to cater to every whim of every end user.
Case in point, Devuan: Not being satisfied with the path Debian was taking, they exercised their choice and are now doing their own thing. Good for them! And to the extent this has reduced the frequency of systemd haters starting yet another anti-systemd flame war on the Debian mailing lists, it seems to me Debian has won too. Hooray!
How is it someone's else's fault for that systemd has dependencies or that others depend on systemd?
If I use and like Firefox, and others depend on Firefox, or Firefox depend on others, then it's Firefox fault for you choosing Firefox?
I really don't understand the argument you're trying to make. You had choices before systemd, and you still have choices even though systemd is widespread, what's the problem? It isn't modular enough? Use something else then that is modular.
OK you're missing the historical context here. To make this story extremely short, the author of Systemd was already known for another project that was causing problems to Linux users but was shipped early. And when Systemd was released, it has several issues, too, so some distros like Debian withheld the switch. But at some point the folks at Red Hat decided to tie Systemd to the login mechanism for Gnome. I don't believe there was any hidden agenda here, it was just more logical for them. However, this caused huge headache for package maintainers of non-Systemd distros. There was the whole drama with voting, Debian project leader leaving, Devuan appearing and so on.
I believe most people moved on, but the way it was all done somehow didn't feel right.
Ok, yes, I wasn't aware of the history, I use whatever my distribution uses as default, and been doing that for decades now, as that tends to be less hassle, so been using systemd for a while because of that.
With this new knowledge about the history, I still feel the same as the original question. AFAIK, no one is forcing people/distributions to adopt systemd. It might be easier, and most takes the easiest route, but that's OK, right? That doesn't mean that you cannot make another choice, maybe involving more work, but you can still make that choice, unless again I miss something obvious here.
The problem is mostly that programs started depending on aspects of systemd that are both very complex, and difficult/impossible to implement without ending up with systemd. Systemd's components don't play well with established standards (sometimes not running standalone at all), which contributes to the feeling of having to buy into the whole ecosystem just to use a small part of it, just for that one bit of a certain program that now depends on it.
This has happened with gnome's display manager, and now gnome-shell is threatening to cease functioning without systemd, as well as on systems that systemd doesn't run on such as the BSDs. KDE's new login manager is now doing the same, so in many respects, people's fears have been validated.
Is that "logout" referring to a user explicitly logging out from a desktop environment? I can't imagine it would apply to a closed SSH session, or at least it wouldn't make sense if it did.
> It is now indeed the case that any background processes that were still running are killed automatically when the user logs out of a session, whether it was a desktop session, a VT session, or when you SSHed into a machine.
And the reddit comments include a link to a tmux issue where the suggested solution is for tmux to add systemd as a dependency (https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428). Includes some back-and-forth about how all sorts of software would have to change in similar ways to accommodate systemd, instead of systemd just playing nicely with decades of established practice.
I had no idea about that. Does seem a bizarre choice for systemd to do that.
I admin a whole bunch of headless servers and so am often SSHing to them and running long running jobs. Some of them run VNC sessions, and I certainly wouldn't want a VNC session to kill of other SSH sessions by the same user. At least with VNC, I almost never "logout" - they're often autostarted (by systemd) and just get killed when the machine gets rebooted.
To be clear: systemd works fine to start/stop services. Usually. If you have a working system with systemd, it's rarely worth ripping out and replacing. That's just more risk than reward.
Citing PulseAudio adds nothing here. Distros decided to ship it early, just like systemd later ... that choice wasn’t pushed by Poettering. Dragging in an earlier project without making an actual technical or governance argument is just character framing. It’s not evidence, it’s a smear.
No, I decided to include it to explain the emotional response to Systemd. I didn't mean to offend anyone. That stuff didn't work and broken things were pushed on people again, that's why some revolted.
At the time desktop Linux projects like consolekit were an unmaintained mess, it needed replacements. Systemd also supported cgroups V2 and people really wanted to use that. No conspiracy or underhandedness required.
I don't think anyone would ever object against systemd as a project, it would make as much sense as objecting against, say, GNU Chess. All software has bugs, and they're gradually worked out. But the way it was introduced that made many people upset.
The way it was introduced was that many people could see the value in cgroups V2 and being able to drop unmaintained projects. Maintainers of distros and projects sometimes did this against some users wants, but in my opinion there was just lots of baseless complaining without creating an alternative.
I don't get it. If you install openbsd, you get dependencies that openbsd developers has chosen. You can try to remove every aspect of those choices but at some point it won't be openbsd anymore.
Is the claim here that Red Hat is unnecessary coupling their critical parts of the distribution in ways that other distributions would not do? A few examples here would be nice.
EEE is about taking existing standards/software and making it eventually incompatible with FOSS. That's very different from creating a new thing, and asking people to use that. AFAIK, they're not replacing anything (but maybe I missed something), so I don't see it as the same as what Microsoft did back in the day.
I think it's similar. We have a big powerful company pushing their solution, pushing more and more software to depend on that solution, so people who want to exercise their choice not to have an increasingly uphill battle to do so.
That doesn't seem so different from what Microsoft used to do, as even back then there was always choice if people decided to get together and exercise it, but practically in both cases it's an uphill battle.
Gnome, for example. GDM now needs systemd's userdb.
It is indeed becoming harder and harder to avoid and I understand that this isn't great, but systemd tackles some genuinely hard problems that others don't. Which is to say I don't begrudge Gnome devs for this and personally prefer systemd over current alternatives.
I've looked at OpenRC, RUnit and S6. I haven't recently run any of them "in production", however.
Personally, I am a strong believer that declaring the desired state is a lot easier to get right than actually writing the code to get there. Beyond that, I'm not saying any of these are bad at being what they are, systemd just has more features, some of which I really like. Two examples I'm actively using currently are automount units and socket activation (S6 also has socket activation). I have some remote folders mounted via SSHFS automatically when I access them and this is incredibly useful for my workflow.
Could I find tools to slot into other init systems that do this for me? Probably. But systemd has this neatly packaged up, easy to configure and easy to introspect state.
It uses a folder with a subfolder for every service. Each subfolder contains a script called run. The system runs the run script. If it exits, it waits two seconds and runs it again. Repeatedly. It's very worse–is–better.
There are commands to control the services and check their status. For example, if a file called down exists next to the run script, it won't run it. This is how you disable a service.
It checks for service folders being created and deleted. New folders are started, and deleted ones are stopped cleanly. They can also be symlinks, so you don't need to worry about deleting a running service folder and you can remove a service from init without erasing the scripts you wrote.
The whole system is useful in many situations and not only as pid 1.
Maybe one day I'll invent a runit–based distribution.
Dependencies may be becoming less properties of software, and more so properties of the distro's systemd wiring.
More and more software will assimilate systemd features. Free distros will patch, shim, emulate, flounder. Or in GPT parlance "Dependencies are no longer intrinsic properties of software; they are emergent properties of a distribution's systemd orchestration layer"
Meanwhile, gripes, fears etc,
'Linux' becomes interpreted vs inspectable.
Requires superfluous new literacy
Convolutes logs, tools
Obscures causality
Centralized control above Unix process model
Fair well ps aux, hello systemctl, cgtop, gls
KILL (less lethalized) superceded, replaced by service stop and mask
Surrender chains for events, ie buggy debugging or complexity accretion
General obfuscation beneath the hood
Centralized ... indexed, logs vs text streams
And....
Upstream assumes systemd
Some resist
Costs rise
Optional becomes expected
Accidental incompatibility
And... systemd ingurgitates one by one, policy, supervision, logging, identity, dependency management and the rest of the world... digests it, and from the aether emerges a sweet smiley face, disgorging forth a monolithic mutant avatar, with Linux features.
I'll be quiet happy to be wrong about everything. Feel free to slaughter everything I've written. I don't even oppose systemd - I simply perceive it as a singularity that's drawing everything around me towards it. Wrong would definitely be good, so please don't hold back. I won't seek pardon for the rant though, because true or false, it's honest.
Edit: I was reading through my threads and thought the parent was asking me, though wasn't. I've unintentionally barged in here, but I'll leave the comment anyway, as it references a very big concern of mine.
With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd.
Want to run xterm? Requires Xorg. rootless Xorg requires udev, udev turned into a systemd component. want to run xterm without systemd? good luck, you are now the maintainer of your own LFS.
The udev developers decided that it made sense to move udev into systemd. If you disagree and want choice, you can fork udev. Actually some people did that, so you can run xterm with eudev instead of udev and thus avoid systemd (though eudev seems hardly maintained now, with the latest release in 2023).
I think it's true that it's an exhausting battle to keep all those parts independent when 95% of the devs/money agree it's better to integrate them. But it wouldn't be fair either for the 5% to put on the others the burden of keeping things independent because of their own preferences...
eudev was just a copy of the udev part of systemd, with some patches to build on musl, and work without systemd.
All of that has been upstreamed now, LFS has instructions on how to build udev from the latest systemd release, without building systemd itself.
Yeah, it’s miserable; xterm shouldn’t require Xorg. It should be agnostic to display system and not force the X monoculture on everyone. Classic Microsoft gestapo tactics: shoehorn Xorg dependencies into tons of unrelated apps and thus curtail user freedom to run xterm with a WinForms or Wayland display system. It’s appalling.
From the project documentation: "The xterm program is a terminal emulator for the X Window System."
The application does not require xorg it requires an x11 server.
It just so happens that until recently xorg was the only game in town as far as Linux x11 servers are concerned.
> With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd.
Yes, but this is hardly a unique systemd/Linux problem. I despise TypeScript for various reasons, always preferred vanilla JavaScript over TypeScript. So if I'm met with "Huh, this library is using TypeScript, am I ready to deal with that", I make the choice to not depend on that, even though half of the ecosystem uses TypeScript.
Going against the grain comes with more work probably, but this is also a choice we make, because we have strong feelings and opinions about something.
Languages are confined. I don't speak Rust — yet — so when I want to modify some software that is written in Rust that is a disappointment. However, the effect of software being written in Rust is limited to that software and its libraries. It doesn't infect your system the way systemd does.
You can turn most parts off. Maybe don't talk about stuff you have not much idea about ?
There is point to complain about distros turning it on by default but you could have systemd where systemd just does unit management and not much more.
The hardest part to get rid of would probably be journald as this parasite's log format is just... not good in any metric but it isn't easy to replace either if you want to keep systemd functionality
Yes! We must mandate that all loyal citizens have to use Arch Linux and Vim. Severe punishment and long prison terms for any other distro or text editor.
Pipepipe stopped downloading audio or video when I was using it a couple of years back.
I switched over to NewPipe as it was better maintained and worked well.
Since past few months, NewPipe is not automatically showing latest YT videos, but it opens the video if I type in the video's source url. Downloads are working fine though, which is what I mainly use it for.
Will try Pipepipe again next weekend if it fares better.
Google is trying to suppress all these FOSS alternatives to its ads-overloaded apps.
It's very black and white. It's an internal affair, and no one elected the USA to be the police of the world.
We could also argue that even internally in the US, the current president was not democratically elected. Maybe you agree that another state should go there and remove him, just because.
I for one would support a Native American take over of the White House, and giving them back their country. You seem to support this logic
>>I for one would support a Native American take over of the White House, and giving them back their country.
What would you do with 100s of millions of Americans who are not decedent from native Americans? I'm even more curious how far back in history would you go to start returning countries to their native populations?
It makes a lot of sense. Whoever wants to continue developing "these apps" will do it privately, and sell the service to those who want to keep doing things in hiding. Well done, watchdog!
So again, it just harms the general public, while making it harder to catch criminals.
It's simpler than that. OSS strong encryption tools are available than anyone can run on the command line to encrypt their messages, which can then just go as attachments via email, whatsapp, etc. No new developers required. And as you say, the general public have to suffer with weak encryption while those who really want to encrypt do so regardless.
Not to be hysterical but when will publicly talking about, or publishing tutorials on how to use such tools get you in hot water for "promoting hostile activities"?
Actually it opens them up to being phished by the government. There have been several high profile cases where because of searching for custom communication services, groups ended up being vulnerable.
>How many cases have there been of groups successfully finding and use private communication services?
Probably a lot, given how booming the illegal drug market is. Obviously you don't hear about the successful ones, you only hear about the incompetent ones that get caught.
Digital Service dominance in this case isn't based on some trait of American Exceptionalism - or conversely based off some sort of lack of academic rigour or work ethic in European Entrepreneurship.
Rather, the current state of SaaS in the context of the historic stock market is a severe economic aberration divorced from any sort of valuation fundamentals like securities weighting. Instead we observe predatory VC and PE entities supported by a complimentary taxation and economic regime, all ultimately facilitated by the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
In short, this notion of self-sufficiency is unachievable in the European context as it is predicated entirely upon wealth inequality and thumbing the scale of the free-market via lobbying, and is the doctrine denounced to the point of anathema in any Socialist Democracy.
The end result here is not some sort of organically earned digital services dominance - instead you end up with scenarios like forcing the FDIC to bail out the VC bank of Choice - SVB - where uninsured deposits were estimated to represent 89 percent of total deposits at the bank, totalling $18 billion of the ultimate $20 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.
Isn't that a selfish view, though? "Works for me,so I don't care that systemd is creating dependencies everywhere for everyone else".
I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives.
Isn't linux about choice? It feels we're going on a downwards spiral where choice is being taken away from us in every domain
reply