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Comment by esarbe | Hacker News Reader

Just because there's a vocal minority that complains very loudly doesn't mean it doesn't work for most users out there.

The distribution maintainers have spoken; systemd is a vastly superior to any alternative out there. It's no contest, really. It makes building and maintaining complex and dynamic system setups laughably easy. So easy that just about every distribution maintainer threw their arms up in the air and said "Fuck that constantly breaking, inconsistent, unportable, unmaintainable init script shit that's SystemV and move to some thing sane."

I've yet to work with a system engineer that dislikes systemd. Has Not Yet Happened.

People complaining about systemd is like people complaining that these newfangled LED lights are not producing enough heat.

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> Just because there's a vocal minority that complains very loudly doesn't mean it doesn't work for most users out there.

That's not adequate in itself. If we were talking about a database that only lost data if your last name started with "Z", then JWZ would probably be quite vocal about it. Even if it worked fine for you and me, that would be a serious problem. If systemd (or anything else) had a major design flaw, that would be important even if most people don't get bitten by it.

> I've yet to work with a system engineer that dislikes systemd. Has Not Yet Happened.

I've heard from plenty who dislike it. Plenty who love it, too, to be sure! But there's definitely a non-negligible set of sysadmins who don't care for it.

> People complaining about systemd is like people complaining that these newfangled LED lights are not producing enough heat.

More like people complaining that every now and then it catches their loft on fire, but so rarely that everyone else thinks it's peachy.

> Just because there's a vocal minority that complains very loudly doesn't mean it doesn't work for most users out there.

Yes, obviously.

> The distribution maintainers have spoken; systemd is a vastly superior to any alternative out there.

This seems like a logical leap. Sure, distros have spoken -- but that doesn't speak to whether or not systemd is generally superior. It only speaks to it being acceptable for distros.

> People complaining about systemd is like people complaining that these newfangled LED lights are not producing enough heat.

I don't see that parallel at all. But I guess it doesn't matter.

What I do know is that I've used systemd a lot, and it certainly has its benefits. But it also has its drawbacks. Personally, the tradeoff is not acceptable to me.

This is why systemd has spurred me to stop using Linux in favor of BSD.

Void Linux is a nice alternative which defaults to runit. I feel like I'll probably end up in the same spot though, switching to BSD.

Yes, there are a number of good distros that don't use systemd. But I see a problem coming down the pike -- as more and more applications start depending on systemd services, systemd will become less optional. For now, that problem can be addressed using shims, but I don't think that will be true forever.

I have a lot of Unix machines, so longevity is important to me. I'm switching to BSD now because it seems to me that the sooner I get that done, the less painful it will be to do. It's a huge task as it is!

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