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Comment by kylek | Hacker News Reader

>> All the other distros, that had better-planned migrations (Arch, ...

I stopped using Arch when my system became unbootable after systemd was initially pushed out.

Conversely; I use Arch with SystemD and it works fine the overwhelming majority of the time.

I have had a couple of snags over time, and many could argue that it's my fault for not reading "the new way" of how things work; like systemd-resolved not resolving anything (even with allow-downgrade which is the default iirc) which isn't DNSSEC validated, such as my entire corporate DNS environment.

Overall I feel like there's many benefits for a desktop system to use SystemD.

I've come to grips with it recently, it brings standardization to many things that were lacking across distributions. I just don't like how much power the project holds over the entire linux ecosystem ("oh hey here's systemd-logind don't mind us taking over all-things-login"-type scenarios)

For the record, my largest gripe with systemd is systemd-resolved too (followed closely by binary logs).

> I just don't like how much power the project holds over the entire linux ecosystem ("oh hey here's systemd-logind don't mind us taking over all-things-login"-type scenarios)

That's totally not the case, all the previous solutions were slightly broken (pam_console, ConsoleKit etc.), and unmaintained.

> For the record, my largest gripe with systemd is systemd-resolved too

So, uninstall it. It's not a part of systemd (the daemon), and totally optional.

The migration itself was notoriously bad (check the forums from around that time, full of really confused people with unbootable systems), though it's likely usable now.

I don't disagree.

I was using fedora religiously (I mean, _really_) between Fedora 15-21, and systemd was actually what caused me to get off of the distro, the upgrade path was truly awful, even for Fedora.

The response was "but it's bleeding edge, what do you expect". And to be honest, I expected better.

Also it meant I had to unlearn a lot of my linux knowledge, and it was specific to fedora at the time.

Also, systemd in its early days was astonishingly broken, and many of the gripes you hear of today likely stem from people who were exposed during that period. (such as binary logs getting corrupted and unceremoniously truncated, boot being non-deterministic meaning your machine didn't boot 1 time out of every 10 and huge smatterings of "waiting for 1m 30s" even with very commonly used packages on a base system).

All that to say: I haven't seen a smooth transition from a non-systemd distro to a systemd enabled distro.

Although, truthfully, I haven't upgraded a Debian installation in-place.

I hear open/S/USE/LED/LES did it right, which makes sense, given they're one of the only distributions with a reason to add it in the first place.

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