I don't buy this, why would someone who complains about the consolidation and standardisation of core tools/services in Linux want to move to FreeBSD which does exactly the same as it is a full operating system and only supports what they ship, anything else you are on your own, just like what we get with standardising around systemd across distros.
The choice/flexibility which is potentially lost if the entire Linux ecosystem embraces systemd was never available on FreeBSD in the first place, what standardising around systemd is doing is moving Linux distros closer to one of the often touted advantages of choosing one of the BSD distros, which is a standard set of core tools/services which can be targeted (however in Linux's case it is across distros as opposed to the BSD's where it is per-OS).
To add one more anecdote: give voidlinux a try at some point. It uses runit as its init system and boots at least twice as fast as a systemd-based arch linux system. As with startups, the idea is less important than good execution, and systemd only succeeded on the former (so far).
With all that being said, I do like that I know how to do common administration on both Arch Linux and RHEL and Debian without learning three toolsets.
That's not my experience, in the discussions I've seen and taken part in, most (as in vast majority) of the detractors are opposed to systemd as a consolidation of a large array of core tools and services all under the same 'umbrella', which is exactly what the BSD's do at an even higher level as they are developed as full operating systems.
I'm not sure what 'happiness to introduce bugs and unbootable systems' refer to, I've been using systemd ever since Arch made the switch (~4 years ago). I've yet to have stability issues and I haven't read of any widespread problems in the Arch forums either.
There are (and likely always will be) distros which default to and promote alternatives (Gentoo comes directly to mind), but in the grand scope we're seeing a huge convergence around systemd across distros, which tells me this type of standardisation is something the Linux ecosystem really pined for overall.
That combined with the systemd developers saying 'Systemd is a Linux-only project, we'll only be accepting patches for Linux and we'll only be supporting Linux. If this breaks on non-Linux systems, you're on your own.' Granted the community has adapted very well, as Gnome Shell running on OpenBSD demonstrates, but the non-inclusive attitude must have left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths and you can understand why they feel bitter.
I'm just not sure that I believe the systemd team is said team. Their behavior on mailing lists and bugzillas has been extremely disconcerting at times, such as when they screwed over kernel developers who used the debug kernel option and basically said 'Tough shit that we broke the existing standard workflow, we don't care' ( https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935 )
Whether or not you agree that reasons like that are enough to distrust the team, if I were to keep running Linux in production, and make my own personal choice about what I am using, I can no longer realistically do this. Extremely necessary things such as udev being merged into systemd (and being a large pain in the ass to compile and use without systemd) mean this is no longer something as easy as replacing one or two components.
I'm all for convergence. Hell, I don't even particularly like sysv init - if systemd was a product as refined as even SMF, I'd care a lot less. And, I like the ease of use of journalctl - I spend a lot less time mangling text with grep and awk and sed when going through logs when I'm not on a system where things are being sent to splunk or kibana.
Whatever happens in the Linux community, I'm not particularly affected. SmartOS and OmniOS already have things very similar to systemd because of their Solaris heritage, and they work well. The BSDs seem to be moving in that direction, and I expect they'll create a solid product. I'll use those and be happy to do so. When I have to deal with other environments where Linux is used, well, I've learned plenty about systemd and feel perfectly comfortable working with it. I won't particularly like it, but ultimately, it's not something I care about to do more than discuss it on the internet.
- still unfixed shutdown errors from systemd - new shutdown errors from systemd - failed to boot or shutdown a system due to a systemd bug hence fixed - harder to fix if shutdown or boot fails compared to old init systems
My impression is that there isn't enough QA for the amount of churn they have in each release. Most bugs are very obvious and not someone using an obscure configuration for his sparcstation.
Standardization for a single common administration interface is a good thing but the resulting product is of sub-par quality thus far.
Honestly, why is this important? I want a system that is fast once booted, not a system that boots quickly.
Could you go in to some detail here, what are the tools that have been turned in to monolithic binaries ?
The systemd project consists of some 70 different binaries, the vast majority of them being optional, and each of them handling specific tasks very much in the UNIX tradition.
They are being developed in the same tree, exactly like the BSD's, and just like the BSD equivalents they want to make use of features the kernel can provide even if that makes it less portable.
Even without that, systemd is still technically unsound in its design: http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/
#use syslog-ng instead of the built-in syslog
syslog_ng_enable="YES"
syslogd_enable="NO"
and as such, I have my own syslog running. Systemd, on the other hand, disabling their syslog is simply not an option, as is the case with so many components that it encompasses.
The BSD's philosophy is indeed to have a cohesive system, however, they recognize that they don't always have the best defaults for every situation, and thus make it easy, and supportable, to set options the way you want.You can set Storage=none and ForwardToSyslog=yes in /etc/systemd/journald.conf [0].
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Syslog-ng#syslog-ng_and...
(This sort of inability to make decisions about what tools you use for your system is one of the complaints about systemd)
I missed this - any link you'd recommend to catch up on what happened?
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2016-Ja... http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/01/01/freebsd-community-b... http://blog.randi.io/2015/12/31/the-developer-formerly-known... https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2015-Ju... https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html
And what do you mean by a systemd like approach?
"etc/rc.d is quite sophisticated for what it does, but the paint on /etc/rc is obvious"
"Too many things need to know explicitly about dependencies"
"Even the Linux die-hards have essentially grasped the necessity of systemd"
Talk is by Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD co-founder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard)
Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8645188, video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mri66Uz6-8Y (49 minutes)
A fair statement would be "FreeBSD may eventually adopt a systemd-like approach."
It furthermore provides a FreeBSD jails extension to the systemd unit file syntax. The JailID=i setting for a service unit is translated into "jexec i" in the native service bundle's run program.
(The FreeBSD core team appears to strongly dislike all the currently proposed options.)