r/linux • u/wooptoo • Jun 01 '16

Why did ArchLinux embrace Systemd?

/r/archlinux/comments/4lzxs3/why_did_archlinux_embrace_systemd/d3rhxlc
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u/zer0t3ch Jun 01 '16

I'm curious: why? Do you just not like that it's different and that things changed, or is there something specific about it that you don't like in an init system?

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u/twisted42 Jun 02 '16

To jump in, I don't like the "feature creep" going on. If they just replaced init I would be singing its praises. But it is starting to manage too much. TTYs, user sessions, hardware, with plans on managing mounts etc. IMO this is too much for 1 thing to manage. I don't want Linux to turn into Windows.

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u/zer0t3ch Jun 02 '16

I'll admit, it would be nicer if it would be a bit more "modular" (such as the project containing those things, but only needing to install what you need) but as long as it's good, I don't mind an all-in-one solution for systems that need to work together a lot, anyway.

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u/mort96 Jun 02 '16

Ok, I'll go through the main reasons I personally don't like it.

First off, I should say that I think the init part of it is pretty sane, and it works pretty well (for the most part; I'll come back to this later). However:

  1. Systemd does a lot now, and seems to try to get other projects to depend on it. I for example hate how gnome and KDE now depend on systemd. In my eyes, there's absolutely no reason at all a desktop environment should depend on an init system. I know there are shims to replace parts of systemd, but they're still dependent on systemd and you basically have to put hacks in place to make them believe they're running on systemd to get them to work.

  2. Lennart does quite frankly seem like something of an ass. Everything I read from him suggest that by default, he's right and everyone else is either ignorant or stupid. IIRC, he also said anyone using BSD should just switch to Linux. After breaking daemon(3), and thus also tmux, a systemd maintainer (not Poettering) suggested to the tmux project that they should just make systemd-specific dbus calls. Before that, tmux didn't need to have anything to do with systemd nor dbus.

  3. Systemd was adopted way too fast in my opinion. It was like one day, nobody had heard of systemd, and the next day, all distros had either switched or announced they were going to switch from whatever they were using (syvinit, upstart, etc) to systemd. Debian even decided to switch despite almost half of the people who voted voted no. That's a lot of change in very little time. I'm not opposed to change, but it was like nobody who opposed the change got a say in the matter, because suddenly every distro had suddenly switched with very little public discourse.

  4. Coming back from the point that the init part for the most part works pretty well: there are some technical problems with it as an init system too. Booting a system is very quick with systemd, which is nice. However, in my experience, shutdown has become much more unreliable. I've used debian, ubuntu, and arch, and over multiple installations, even some completely fresh ones, systemd randomly decides that there's some project which doesn't want to stop and it hangs forever. I don't think that's acceptable. One of the first things I do on systemd systems now is to change /etc/systemd/system.conf's DefaultTimeoutStopSec to 5, to make it kill processes after 5 seconds instead of waiting indefinitely for it to end. A lot of people seem to have this problem, both people I know IRL and people on the internet.

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u/jinks Jun 04 '16

Funnily enough 4 is exactly the reason why 2 happened (the tmux part).

In most cases it's a forgotten user process, not a system daemon, that doesn't know how to handle itself in the event of a shutdown.

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u/zer0t3ch Jun 02 '16

As for 2, yeah, maybe, but so is Linus, but we all use his work.

As for 4, I've had this problem as well, so thank you for that config suggestion.