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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

The lack of "monoculture" (whether systemd or something else - which the author says is a good thing) is the reason Linux software distribution is still a shit-show and every single distro has their own, incompatible way of doing things so you can't just provide a single binary and get on with your day like you can with Windows or Mac.

Systemd might have its flaws but I'm so grateful that a service/unit file will work on pretty much any distro and that my knowledge of it will serve me on pretty much any modern Linux system, as opposed to years ago where every distro had their own unique way of managing services.

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This is especially true since any init system which sets out to "escape from systemd" will eventually end up doing everything that systemd does, at which point it will be as complex as systemd.

HOWEVER - the Linux world has lived with these problems for ages and I deem it also a strength. You can switch around components, mix and match and it will mostly work. You can run KDE apps on GNOME no problemo. I think this is something we should consider a positive. If we can unify around a common service file language, we can swap out service managers easy.

> You can run KDE apps on GNOME no problemo.

well you can also run KDE apps on windows and macOS so it would be quite the shit show if they did not run on GNOME :-)...

That's ... a good point.

You are basing your argument upon the false premise of doing everything that systemd does. Several people, perhaps most notably the Uselessd Guy, set out to do only a subset. After all, one of the common critiques is that one really does not have to reinvent things like a resolving proxy DNS server and an NTP server in order to manage services. (A resolving proxy DNS server is one of the things that is notoriously easy to reinvent badly, moreover. The DNS is full of traps for implementors.)

I hate things mostly work. Countless of hour of debugging, refactoring on the way.

A system need to be designed first, proved correct first.

> every single distro has their own, incompatible way of doing things

This doesn’t have to be the case; there can be multiple implementations of one standard (like we have it the web).

Unfortunately there is no such thing as an "init system standard".

OpenRC

Indeed. This is one of the areas that the POSIX standardization effort specifically shied away from.

I think systemd has much improved the compatibility of daemon initialization between distros. It used to be that init.d shell scripts distributed with some software often would not work on an arbitrary distro, if it was included at all, because of details of that distro. With systemd, unit files seem to be mostly compatible between distros. So I think it is quite an improvement.

Having a monolithic approach can be advantageous but there are a lot of alternatives for that. For me linux just works. Windows couldn't sort desktop links in a sensible manner for months on the biannual channel and there are enough other problems.

True about the knowledge part, but that often leads to the adoption of suboptimal solutions. I know that the quest for absolute purity is also a problem for a lot of devs but many newer "consolidated" operating systems, especially in the mobile segment, should serve as ample warnings. Yes, those are successful, but they are also basically shit. And that is an objective assessment.

> so you can't just provide a single binary and get on with your day

This was the motivation behind snap / flatpack / appimage. We're getting there. Not in the way I'd prefer, but for end-user apps it works.

I would very much prefer the so-called “shit show” to having a binary-only distro.

Strikes me as a false dichotomy. One does not preclude the other

> just provide a single binary

Just provide a single source and get on with your day. It's Linux after all. No need for huge monolithic binary piles of crap from Poettering to start your system.

Source is great, but it's not a usability improvement. Trying to compile someone's code source with awkward dependencies is not fun.

The ports trees in the BSDs make the process fairly straightforward.

I said binary to make it faster. Sources would have the same problem when it comes to init scripts. Systemd unit files would at least work on pretty much any systemd-powered distro.

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