Hacker News Reader

Comment by ratsmack | Hacker News Reader

>systemd is a set of building blocks that you can use to make a linux system.

A more accurate description would be "Systemd is a set of building blocks that you can use to make Linux more like Windows".

View on HN

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I don't quite see the resemblance. Could you elaborate?

As far as I can tell the only "windows-y" thing is binary logs and even then you got all the tools to get a plaintext stream to process. Corruption of the logs can be a problem but it's nothing compared to...dunno, I assume people are drawing parallels to that and Windows' binary Registry, but then again I don't think I have had a Registry-related failure in decades. Besides, if anything, dconf is much more Windows than anything systemd could do, but I don't see anywhere as much vitriol for it.

I'm thoroughly confused about this small war with systemd. I missed all the early drama so I barely know what it's about, but in practice systemd has never failed me.

systemd is incredibly Linux centric. In fact it intentionally doesn't even try to be remotely portable, because an explicit design aim was to expose all the cool stuff that Linux has, but wasn't getting enough use.

Sure, but design-wise it follows Windows principles: it’s tightly coupled, and not particularly tweakable.

These days I see it as a bonus. I don't want to mess around with the boot process. I don't want to write some sort of glue layer in between loosely coupled parts. And I certainly don't want somebody else to do it either, because that too often tends to result in some kind of surprise that one has to deal with at 3 AM.

What I want is a solid system that does what it's supposed to -- start stuff -- in a maximally boring fashion.

Sure, I understand that. But this way your getting another Windows, except with source code.

I'm not seeing the problem. I use computers to get stuff done, not because of some sort of religious ideas about how things out to work.

While I prefer Linux in general, Windows does have some good ideas in some places, and I don't see any issue with using them.

This is far from true, lmao. It's only tightly coupled to depending on the Linux kernel.

systemd was in fact heavily inspired by MacOS's launchd. At worst, it can be said that complex boot managers will begin to converge on a design that actually works ~ MacOS did, Windows did, and now Linux has with systemd. The three have plenty of differences, though systemd is still closer to launchd than not.

And in actuality, it's very tweakable. Did you notice that the source code is open, for a start...?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com