I hated it and still do because for a period of years every weird, difficult to find issue on a bunch of servers was caused by systemd. It may be fine now, but I switched to Devuan and have had incredible stability. Poettering’s response to security issues was also terrible and honestly the dude seems like a real piece of shit.
Systemd on a server is disaster.
Excuse me but wtf? How many machines do you manage?
Right now five servers. Three with Alpine Linux and two FreeBSD servers.
Ok I see. Without any intention to sound offensive, 5 servers is not enough to really see the pro cons of either init system. People handling 50 times those numbers encounter issues where it starts to matter, and those people tend to claim that, while it ain’t perfect, it is a lot better than any alternative
You see, I scaled down a little in recent years because that is not my primary job any more. But, I am working as an admin from 1998. so my word should have some weight, right?
All words from any it admin have weight, that is not what I meant.
Its just that init scripts and weird boot requirements are really crap to manage at scale and my job, like many others became a lot easier with systemd, that is why almost everyone uses it now. In my experience those that complain either never encountered these issues because they never scaled enough and like to use what they were used to, or prefer to write a script over a config file and make this a religious issue for some reason.
I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn’t make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.
Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.
Is it really breaking it? As far as I’m aware, it’s more like gnu. It has components and you can select what you use (here meaning distros and packagers).
People mistake this for a monolith because it’s all named systemd-thing. Integration, like you said, was and is needed. But what if all those separate utilities and services are actually disconnected and speak some protocol different to pipe? Does it make it less unixy?
And poettering is an absolute good guy here. Pulseaudio wasn’t perfect, but did it improve things compared to what was there before? Sure it did. Even now, pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.
Perfect is the enemy of good. And while all these tools might not be perfect, they are the best in the Linux world.
poettering is an absolute good guy here
Agreed. But he’s also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.
pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.
I wasn’t talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can’t count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.
Pulseaudio was introduced in 2004. How come it took almost 20y for it to be replaced if it was that bad?
Implementation, being what it is, improved the situation compared to alsa and other things before it. Again, while not perfect it made things better for everyone.
It’s funny that this is a thing attributed to poettering as bad since things before were way worse… why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?
I really don’t get it.
And all of these things are optional. The fact that distro people and companies select them is because they solve real world problems.
Pulseaudio was introduced in 2004. How come it took almost 20y for it to be replaced if it was that bad?
Did you learn nothing from X11 usage? May I remind you that X11 was invented by Xerox in the fucking 80s?!
Bad software attaches itself to OSs like a cancer.
I always assumed that Poettering is an arse to people because of the hate he got for systemd. I imagine it’s hard to see the best in people when there’s a crowd of haters everywhere you go. Though I have no idea what he was like beforehand.
