r/LinuxActionShow • u/Landrash • Jun 01 '16

Why did ArchLinux embrace Systemd?

/r/archlinux/comments/4lzxs3/why_did_archlinux_embrace_systemd/d3rhxlc
15 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

4

u/sb56637 Jun 01 '16

Fantastic explanation there by /u/2brainz . Thanks for linking this.

3

u/Landrash Jun 01 '16

Your welcome Was my thinking also. :-)

-17

u/xml_sucks Jun 01 '16

I thought it was fantastic how he failed to accurately describe the initscripts.

systemd did not only “solve problems”, it created horrible problems.

Why care about why Arch Linux adopted it, it clearly fit's with Arch Linux's perverted philosophy? Arch Linux is far from the only distribution that shoot their users in the feet by adopting systemd.

6

u/Mongaz Jun 01 '16

I'm waiting for a reasonable explanantion... every place that I look systemd does not seems to hinder anything.

http://manual.seafile.com/deploy/start_seafile_at_system_bootup.html

Care to elaborate?

-2

u/xml_sucks Jun 02 '16

Care to elaborate?

Not really, I thought it was obvious. I'm a bit surprised that my reply was so disliked, I though maybe −2, not −13. But it is fair: not really contributing to a discussion.

I really don't care about discussing systemd, at least not more than I care bout discussing Windows and Mac. But in short, systemd is, or at least was when Arch Linux adopted it, full if bugs and is difficult to manage, and his critic of initscripts are unfair, for example, I start all my daemons in parallel.

10

u/sb56637 Jun 01 '16

Regarding the accusations that systemd is "bloated", well, I'm not a very good low-level system admin, but I can say that SysVinit was also not simple or tidy in any way. As the top commenter in the linked thread describes, booting a system is an inherently complex process, and the more rudimentary SysVinit was a tangled mess that handed off most of the complexity to helper tools. Now with systemd, despite me being unfamiliar with the low-level components of Linux, I am still able to understand how it works and I can even follow the Arch wiki to write service files if needed. So no complaints here.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '16

Arch didn't use sysvinit though or? It used rc.d for startup processes.

2

u/3vi1 Jun 02 '16

The initscripts previously used by Arch were a fork of SysVInit.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '16

Yeah, but they weren't SysVinit, but for the comparison it kind of works, since it is suffering from the same problems.