This post is amusing and funny, but personally I love systemd and I was also very fond of PulseAudio that brought massive improvements at the time.
Lennart Poettering is absolutely a hero of Linux and Open Source, and helping Linux as a full blown high quality OS get to where it is today. Stronger and better than ever!!! Contrary to other major operating systems that suffer from serious Enshittification.
Remember before systemd the most popular init system was upstart, and upstart was buggy as hell, with very serious bugs that existed for years without being fixed, because the basic design of init systems made it very very hard (impossible). and upstart was arguably the best among the rest. But because Ubuntu also switched to systemd, upstart has been deprecated because Upstart was an Ubuntu project.
systemd was an entirely new design strategy that fixed errors that had been impossible to fix with traditional init systems.
However some still prefer System V init, and I think Gentoo still uses that as default, I suppose because they find it better (easier to use) for tinkerers that micro-control everything.
But IMO the design of systemd seems like pure genius, really a solution to a problem that needed fixing.
But Ubuntu did put some effort into improving the init process with Upstart, and it was the fastest init system until systemd beat it by being way way better at multi threading.
Ubuntu also massively improved how well Linux worked on laptops, and upstart was part of that effort too.
What is best can be subjective, being the most popular signifies that most people found it to be best.
I’d wager most folks aren’t even sure why systemd was “controversial” and don’t remember a time before it, but are instead just jumping on systemd implementing age as a field.
A lot of the controversy against systemd was pure bullshit.
but are instead just jumping on systemd implementing age as a field.
My guess is you are right, but age verification is not an idea of systemd, implementing it is an attempt at making it possible to fulfill a legal requirement by some countries. It’s stupid, but stupid is now planned to be legally required in some countries.
This is probably because it’s still hard to get to work without handcrafting for a particular system, IMO a very telling difference between the old init designs contrary to systemd that handles parallel startups like a champ.
In my experience, booting using single threaded inits (at least in their early stages) actually speeds up the process. The overhead from multithreaded startup on something as simple as an init system can hurt startup performance, especially on older CPUs.
Of course you need a CPU capable of multi threading, which today means any CPU, but then there is no doubt that the multithreaded init process is way faster.
This was thoroughly tested when systemd demonstrated it.
Single threaded init processes have bottlenecks, and a single issue will stall the whole process. Of course systemd only influence boot speed of user space, but the Linux kernel itself is also multithreaded in it’s boot processes today, because it is without a doubt faster.
SystemD itself was fine. Not great but better than what we had and I was happy with what it did.
But then it started to sprawl and take over things it had no business doing.
At this point I am no longer using the Linux kernel, I’m using the SystemD kernel, and as soon as Poettering feels like it he can simply sell the rights to SystemD to a big corpo like Microsoft once everything fully depends on it.
There were pros and cons, I get the annoyance with the binary vs text files.
But systemd booted faster than upstart, despite upstart was made for speed and systemd was made for being robust. The robustness of systemd however made it possible to make the ini process multithreaded and still work flawlessly, where old ini systems tend to have race conditions that make it near impossible.
systemd is more robust, faster and more flexible, so how it wasn’t great remains a mystery to me?
This post is amusing and funny, but personally I love systemd and I was also very fond of PulseAudio that brought massive improvements at the time.
Lennart Poettering is absolutely a hero of Linux and Open Source, and helping Linux as a full blown high quality OS get to where it is today. Stronger and better than ever!!! Contrary to other major operating systems that suffer from serious Enshittification.
Remember before systemd the most popular init system was upstart, and upstart was buggy as hell, with very serious bugs that existed for years without being fixed, because the basic design of init systems made it very very hard (impossible). and upstart was arguably the best among the rest. But because Ubuntu also switched to systemd, upstart has been deprecated because Upstart was an Ubuntu project.
systemd was an entirely new design strategy that fixed errors that had been impossible to fix with traditional init systems.
However some still prefer System V init, and I think Gentoo still uses that as default, I suppose because they find it better (easier to use) for tinkerers that micro-control everything.
But IMO the design of systemd seems like pure genius, really a solution to a problem that needed fixing.
For 5 years; maybe. Before, during, and since, sysV is still the most popular.
And, as dictionaries, politics and Windows will tell you, what is popular is not always best.
Yes upstart was relatively short lived 8 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart_(software)
But Ubuntu did put some effort into improving the init process with Upstart, and it was the fastest init system until systemd beat it by being way way better at multi threading.
Ubuntu also massively improved how well Linux worked on laptops, and upstart was part of that effort too.
What is best can be subjective, being the most popular signifies that most people found it to be best.
I’d wager most folks aren’t even sure why systemd was “controversial” and don’t remember a time before it, but are instead just jumping on systemd implementing age as a field.
Ive been riding SystemD for its faults since the beginning. The age verification was just one more on the pile.
A lot of the controversy against systemd was pure bullshit.
My guess is you are right, but age verification is not an idea of systemd, implementing it is an attempt at making it possible to fulfill a legal requirement by some countries. It’s stupid, but stupid is now planned to be legally required in some countries.
Yep, turns out technology enthusiasts who have a vested interest in an operating system are an opinionated bunch
Gentoo offers systemd and OpenRC, not SysV
OK thanks apparently OpenRC is a further development of Sysvinit, having many similarities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRC
This is probably because it’s still hard to get to work without handcrafting for a particular system, IMO a very telling difference between the old init designs contrary to systemd that handles parallel startups like a champ.
In my experience, booting using single threaded inits (at least in their early stages) actually speeds up the process. The overhead from multithreaded startup on something as simple as an init system can hurt startup performance, especially on older CPUs.
Of course you need a CPU capable of multi threading, which today means any CPU, but then there is no doubt that the multithreaded init process is way faster.
This was thoroughly tested when systemd demonstrated it.
Single threaded init processes have bottlenecks, and a single issue will stall the whole process. Of course systemd only influence boot speed of user space, but the Linux kernel itself is also multithreaded in it’s boot processes today, because it is without a doubt faster.
SystemD itself was fine. Not great but better than what we had and I was happy with what it did.
But then it started to sprawl and take over things it had no business doing.
At this point I am no longer using the Linux kernel, I’m using the SystemD kernel, and as soon as Poettering feels like it he can simply sell the rights to SystemD to a big corpo like Microsoft once everything fully depends on it.
There were pros and cons, I get the annoyance with the binary vs text files.
But systemd booted faster than upstart, despite upstart was made for speed and systemd was made for being robust. The robustness of systemd however made it possible to make the ini process multithreaded and still work flawlessly, where old ini systems tend to have race conditions that make it near impossible.
systemd is more robust, faster and more flexible, so how it wasn’t great remains a mystery to me?
deleted by creator
WTF? I also mentioned upstart, and I call them init systems after the original init?!
Can you even read?
I zoomed too fast, my bad.
OK at least you admit the mistake. 👍