Linux distros without systemd

Discussion in 'all things UNIX' started by guest, May 20, 2019.

  1. guest

    guest Guest

    Linux distros without systemd
    If you want a good life without systemd, here's ...
    May 20, 2019
    https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2019/05/20/linux-distros-without-systemd/
     
  2. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    I don't think the average user really cares that much if their system runs systemd or not.
     
  3. Alec

    Alec Registered Member

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    I recently came across this talk entitled "The Tragedy of systemd" (https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo). And although the title might erroneously be interpreted as systemd is a complete tragedy, what the speaker really conveys is that "systemd represents change" and developers tend to oppose change that they themselves don't instigate. It's a good piece on the background history of systemd as well as some of the rationale for why something like systemd is necessary... even if you perhaps take issue with the precise implementation. Generally, it's just a good talk about how contempt is not the answer, and that system software such as this that responds dynamically is hard to get right for anybody (but everyone should be welcome to try).
     
  4. Beyonder

    Beyonder Registered Member

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    Honestly, how many people care about this? It's not like it actually matters to 99.9% of people.
     
  5. reasonablePrivacy

    reasonablePrivacy Registered Member

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    I think in Linux community is generally more people aware about how computer, OS works (at least at higher abstraction levels) than in general population. For example I care about that.
     
  6. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    I don't know about that. I've been using Linux for years and I have very little idea of how the OS works. I'd heard of systemd but I had to look up what it was and why some developers are opposed to it.
     
  7. summerheat

    summerheat Registered Member

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    IMO, the hostile stance of many people is completely overblown. I've been using several distros with systemd in the past years and haven't run into any serious problems. And on the other hand, systemd offers a lot of advantages, e.g., powerful sandboxing of services (using many existing security mechnisms in the kernel like seccomp, namespaces etc.) which is definitely a good thing security-wise.
     
  8. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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    You 've being using them on how many systems, how many servers or systems that need to be online 24/7, and especially how many of them are administrated remotely?

    When systemd hangs, is a nightmare to debug and is impossible to investigate without having physical access on the system. And no, the hostile stance of many people is not overblown. Other init systems do not take down a machine when a service or a secondary driver e.g. azalia codec fails to initialize...

    Panagiotis
     
  9. Stefan Froberg

    Stefan Froberg Registered Member

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    If you are system administrator, responsible of several thousands of Linux servers, then you have lot's of
    "fun" ahead for you if the servers use systemd....

    Fun things like:

    1. Binary logs: In old days, if your server started to crash/hang unexpectetly, you could just grab the logs and view them later on any text editor. Now you need to use specific program to view your logs.
    2. Systemd logs, most of the time, does not tell why you machine crashed/hanged.
    3. But that doesn't really matter because also, most of the time, the **** logs are corrupted anyway.
    (Hey! Who needs logs anyway? )
    4. Systemd is the only existing init system that can be crached remotely by sending malformed DNS packet. (Fixed now)
    5. Systemd is the only existing init system that can be owned remotely by malicious dhcp6 packet (Fixed now)
    6. It has google DNS servers hardcoded by default as a failsafe (say goodbye to your privacy if things go wrong)
    7. It's the only init system that does DNS, DHCP, mount, and ton's of other stuff that should not be in a sane init system.
    In a word, it's bloated pig and continues to fatten because hey, why not put all the system critical code into one basket?
    As it eats more and more of the core functionality traditionally provided by other simpler software (KISS principle) it get's more buggy and more vulnerable. The idea of init system is to be as small as possible and only boot the system. No DNS resolution. No DHCP handling.
    8. Lead developer has zero knowledge howto code safe network facing code (systemd DNS server is/was vulnerable
    to DNS spoofing, a thing that actual DNS vendors had fixed over a decade ago)
    9. Lead developer has god complex.
    10. Lead developer does not even care of writing safe code. Not checking for null pointer is perfectly okay by him ... :eek:
    11. Code is largely undocumented. If it starts to hang or crash you better start reading source code and find workarounds ... So fun!
    12. The unit files are ugly mess. This thing was supposed to replace the init scripts because it was supposed to be easier? :argh:
    13. There is no real reason to have it. All the containers, seccomp etc.. are part of Linux kernel, systemd has nothing to do with it. Few millisecond boot time improvement because parallel execution is irrelevant in server environment where reboots should be avoided and majority of the booting time is spent initializing hardware.
     
  10. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    If systemd was the apocalyptic disaster that some say it is I doubt Shuttleworth would have utilised it in Ubuntu.

    https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316

    I've been running Xenial Xerus since Boxing Day and it's more stable than Trusty Tahr in my experience.
     
  11. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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    Have you actually read that blog? o_O
    Upstart was stable and all and gave his OS competitive advantage... blah,blah,blah... but he decided that they will ditch it for systemd because debian decided to ditch it too...:argh:

    Panagiotis
     
  12. reasonablePrivacy

    reasonablePrivacy Registered Member

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    Before Debian other major distros such as OpenSUSE, Fedora and even Arch switched to systemd as well. I don't like systemd, but I understand decision to not go in opposite direction than other major GNU/Linux distributions.
     
  13. summerheat

    summerheat Registered Member

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    I won't go into details - but, yes, systemd had/has its vulnerabilities like many other programs, too. That's certainly not a special feature of systemd.

    Besides: Red Hat is earning much money with RHEL. I'm sure they wouldn't presume to use systemd (and their many customers wouldn't, either) if it were really that disastrous as you're suggesting. It would be stupid of them doing so.
     
  14. chrisretusn

    chrisretusn Registered Member

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    Slackware users here. Happy is a pig in slop. That is all. :)
     
  15. Compu KTed

    Compu KTed Registered Member

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    If one installs systemd how do you go about completely removing it?
    What do you replace it with? Running Linux Mint Xfce 19.1
     
  16. reasonablePrivacy

    reasonablePrivacy Registered Member

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    Removing is easy. Problem is that many packages in most distributions depend on systemd and will be removed with it. It also depends on distro - in some distributions there are two or more packages that may be used as a dependency for other packages.
     
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