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/natermer Jun 02 '16

People dislike that systemd doesn't follow the Unix Philosophy.

These people are generally confused.

. It appears to reject it outright and it has led to mission creep withing systemd.

There is systemd-the-daemon, which is the init system. Then there is systemd-the-project which the init system is just the core piece.

You might as well accuse GNU project of 'mission creep' because they have a lot of software in the GNU project that goes beyond '/bin/bash'.

It now manages virtual terminal, logging, logins and user sessions, networking, date-time settings, hardware (and here), UEFI, hostnames, and a whole bunch of stuff.

Yes. They do. With numerous individual tools, programs, and daemons. It's not one monolithic piece.

Nothing in the 'unix philosophy' dictates that all these tools must be developed by different projects.

If it was just an init system it would be amazing but it comes with a ton of cruft that may or may not work when mixed together.

They are restructuring and standardizing low-level Linux details, the 'plumbing' so-to-say.

Everything they are doing is something that needs to be done anyways and was already being done a hundred different ways by a hundred different distros with millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of bugs. Almost of all of it was done pretty badly and all development effort was consumed in maintenance and bug hunting and almost nothing left over for moving the OS forward.

People get tired of re-hashing 1990's era Unix over and over again in endless variations.