Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

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When systemd first appeared in the Fedora distribution that I use(d) it was the shiny new, but not fully debugged thing. I had more than one nasty hang because of it and why did they have to mess up something that worked, and could be understood by mere mortals?

But let's face it, systemd has now matured. My machines work, recipes for getting things done the systemd way are easily googled, and anyway I rely on it (I assume it's systemd) anyway for the relatively painless multi-seat setup on a big computer that would otherwise not be worth running 24/7.

And maybe this is the best part: Since systemd has completely taken over Linux, and IBM has taken over Fedora and I'm not so sure about the direction that's going (Silverblue? CentOS now being a bleeding-edge testbed?) maybe I should try Debian. It's a more "pure" Linux experience anyway. Surprise! All the hard stuff is the same, almost no pain in switching.

The pure old days of Unix/Linux, where a mere mortal could understand the entire boot/init process, are over. But in those old days you couldn't just plug in an encrypted or NTFS-formatted portable hard disk and expect it to just work either.

I do get the impression that systemd keeps the pain alive by continually absorbing functionality, Borg-like. Service X worked trouble-free for years? Never mind that, use our rewrite. And then you have to wait for that to mature.

Philosophically I prefer the idea of "one tool for the job", and I don't like the idea that systemd has swallowed so many different services (from udev to dhcpd).

But practically? It just works. It is consistent, very well documented, and I have to say that it has saved me a lot of time - writing systemd unit-files is almost a pleasure.

So, while I understand some people have very strong views, I'm kinda OK with systemd having "won".

Maybe in 20 years we'll have something different offered, and people will be hugging their systemd and refusing to move away from it?

systemd is not even close to being "consistent" and "well-documented" enough to be all-around usable. It's not about people having "strong views" about it, it's about a bleeding-edge codebase with a very kludgy design being promoted for use in production systems.

> But in those old days you couldn't just plug in an encrypted or NTFS-formatted portable hard disk and expect it to just work either.

automounting features have been around for ages, they don't depend on systemd. And a system that keeps adding and "absorbing" functionality cannot be described as mature.

The other thing is that I'm finally noticing machines actually booting faster, after years of promise. And one of systemd's biggest frustrations - making shutdown a perilous journey that could hang, just like that other OS that starts with W - seems to have gone recently too. My Raspi400 shuts down in seconds and a couple of slow outdated laptops used by the kids also shut down pretty OK. The main machine is always up of course.

>But let's face it, systemd has now matured

Has it? It is still written in C. That doesn't strike me as mature. That strikes me as vulnerable. Have they considered using a memory safe systems language like Rust? It should be rewritten in Rust, because every new line of C written is a long term liability.

System D hasn’t matured. Nobody even knows when it’ll be finished or what other features it will subsume.

It’s an OS, and that’s fine. But it’s not an OS which I like or need, and it’s way too buggy and unreliable to be used even as a part of systemd/Linux/GNU.

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