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> and there should be Linux distros packaged without systemd.

systemd should be an optional package on all distros. Shoving it down throats is one of the valid major criticisms. What should have happened instead is systemd was optional on Debian at setup and Debian was forked to include it by default. It is simply backwards that Debian needed to be forked for purity. Duvuan shouldn't need to exist, but it very much does.

The entire ideology of openness and freedom has been turned on its head. Instead of "what is best for everyone is good enough for me," has become with entitlement "what is best for me is good enough for everyone." Maybe you like the way you do things, but would any here really insist on forcing everyone else to use your methods and no others?

systemd, among other valid criticisms, is unmistakably fascist. For anyone but parent, don't just be thin-skinned and downvote my comment because you have allowed yourself to be insulted. Be courageous and disagree with me if you can. How is systemd not fascist?

The primary definition of fascism, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, is this:

> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

systemd has nothing to do with nation or race. There are much better words than fascism to describe Debian's prioritization of systemd.

Thank you, and a worthy attempt, but as you have defined Fascism, the political movement and a noun and proper name, as opposed to the adjective fascist, as in advocation of an authoritarian regime and in opposition of and intolerant of opposing views, and in modern definitions, a synonym of "bullying," your post is somewhat of a straw man. Obviously I was not suggesting that systemd was literally Nazi software. What I was saying is that systemd, as an unnecessarily complex machine in itself as it proceeds to annex other parts of the system, is autocratic, strongly regimented and centralized, suppresses opposition, and subordinates individual interests.

I would suggest a better word to describe systemd design philosophy is authoritarian, if we're going to stick with political science terminology.

Human systems tend to flourish when political and economic decision-making is relatively distributed throughout a given population. I believe this position is backed by a reasonable amount of empirical observation.

Machines are (as of this writing) programmed by humans. Unlike humans, machines are automated rule-followers. This is substantively different from decision-making, which is a uniquely human trait involving moral agency, free will, etc. (at least as I'm defining it for the purposes of my argument). If you try to turn humans into automated rule-followers by decree, they tend to become miserable. Fortunately, one does not have to take into account how machines feel about being absolved of all decision-making, making such control systems very effective (you don't have to kill / imprison the dissenters). But even though the machines might be more effectively programmed by a centralized, unified, top-down, "authoritarian" control architecture, you still need humans to build this controller. And since we know software projects end up mirroring the communication structure of the humans in charge of building them, it follows that authoritarian-minded software engineers would be a best fit for building such systems.

The converse is that libertarian-minded software engineers tend to recoil in horror when they encounter authoritarian software design, no matter how unified, elegant, or effective it may be. Such things are a moral transgression to the libertarian.

>systemd should be an optional package on all distros.

Why? Should glibc also be optional? What about the Linux kernel? What about apt-get? You can technically replace those things but it's a ton of extra work, almost like shipping a completely different distro. At the end of the day, a distro decides what packages it wants to support and what it doesn't. The specific choice of supported packages is often what defines a distro and sets it apart from the rest. If they have limited manpower and choose to save themselves time by picking only one init, or libc, or desktop environment, or anything, that's their decision.

>but would any here really insist on forcing everyone else to use your methods and no others?

No. There are hundreds of Linux distributions to choose from, and anyone can make more distributions any time they want. No one is forced to do anything. Also, using Linux is optional to begin with.

>systemd, among other valid criticisms, is unmistakably fascist. For anyone but parent, don't just be thin-skinned and downvote my comment because you have allowed yourself to be insulted. Be courageous and disagree with me if you can. How is systemd not fascist?

You should stop and think a bit more before making these comments that you appear to be acknowledging as histrionic and insulting. By this definition BSD is also "fascist" due to only shipping BSD init, and the Linux kernel is "fascist" due to only shipping one set of drivers, and Devuan is also "fascist" for not supporting systemd...

Why? That is a very good question!

Libc and linux kernel are good solutions to well defined problems: a standard C library, and a kernel. They pretty much do what is expected, sometimes they do more, but not by much.

Systemd? It is not a good replacement for an init system for the users. Instead, it is an OS functionality accretion for the benefit of distributors, a baroque monstrosity that provides mediocre buggy solutions to too many problems that have nothing to do with init. It boots nondeterministically (socket activation is not such a universally great idea), sometimes hangs randomly, it disrespects the user when ignoring keyboard input while waiting 90s or indefinitely for some condition, or launching zillions of bogus hog processes for every user login event. Some of these can be mitigated on a production server, but bad taste remains.

>Libc and linux kernel are good solutions to well defined problems: a standard C library, and a kernel

That's subjective. I've talked to a lot of Windows users who all say Linux is a terrible solution for them. I don't think most Debian developers feel they should suddenly drop everything and start making Linux exactly like a copy of Windows just to please those people. They voted on this several times, they wanted systemd.

>it is an OS functionality accretion for the benefit of distributors

There's no problem with this. Most users don't touch the init system that much. They interact with it primarily through the package manager installing service files.

>solutions to too many problems that have nothing to do with init

Those are all optional add-ons for users who are having thoes problems.

>It boots nondeterministically (socket activation is not such a universally great idea)

This is also only an option. You don't have to use socket activation. It's there if you want it and you don't need to strictly order services.

>sometimes hangs randomly, it disrespects the user when ignoring keyboard input while waiting 90s or indefinitely for some condition

Not sure what this means or what keyboard input you were pressing. In systemd the keyboard shortcut to force reboot is pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del 7 times: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sys...

>or launching zillions of bogus hog processes for every user login event

Not sure what this means either. You can disable those.

> That's subjective. I've talked to a lot of Windows users who all say Linux is a terrible solution for them.

That's a different statement. I said those linux parts are good solutions to a libc library and unix kernel. Not good solutions to needs of Windows users.

> Most users don't touch the init system that much.

Most BFU users don't touch the init system. If you're a developer/administrator/power user, you do. Yes there is more BFUs (website users, android users) than power users, but that does not mean that the latter group should be pushed to not care about their init system.

> Those are all optional

Not in practice; some of those options are integrated and others are chosen by the distributions. It's hard to reconfigure the system to opt out of journald or user session control.

> You don't have to use socket activation. It's there if you want it and you don't need to strictly order services.

Yes, but that won't solve the problem entirely, systemd is non-deterministic init system where you can't fix the boot order reliably.

> Not sure what this means or what keyboard input you were pressing. In systemd the keyboard shortcut to force reboot is pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del 7 times

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z. I mean I don't always want to reboot because something went wrong in the boot process and systemd is stalling. I want info from my init what went wrong, and the option to fix the problem in the shell if possible. This is often not allowed by systemd when it could.

> Not sure what this means either. You can disable those.

It means systemd launches bogus processes slowing down the system. It's well known, it's in the trackers, yes I can and i do disable them.

The point is this sucks and neither the systemd developers neither the distribution(rhel and derivatives) care to fix this.

> Should glibc also be optional? What about the Linux kernel? What about apt-get?

In my opinion, yes, they should absolutely be optional. Whether or not that is feasible today does not change the advantages of each component of the system being optional and replaceable. It is more failure tolerant both from a purely technical perspective, and also from an organizational perspective.

If you're only talking in hypotheticals then they're already optional and replaceable. Someone just needs to do the work to replace them.

You're missing that these parts have to get replaced for a practical reason. Not just because someone vaguely feels it would be more fault tolerant. For example, think of some other libc that's optimized for a certain hardware. Distros that don't support that hardware would have no reason to ever use that libc. If you say all distros should support it, then your opinion is really "all distros should support this random hardware that might be rare, expensive, highly specialized, hard to develop for, etc" and now that's a much more complex and demanding task you're asking someone to do, for very little benefit.

I'm not saying that every distro should support every piece of software that's out there, that would be wasteful and very difficult.

What I am saying is that, ideally, every component in a distro (or any important software, really) should have at least two options, so that if one option fails for whatever reason, the user has a choice to swap it and keep working. This is already true with many components of a distribution.

This is how I am writing my application. It is not fully there yet, but I plan for every dependency to have an alternative. I also favor dependencies with long streaks of no breaking changes, having been previously affected by breaking changes in dependencies I was using.

And systemd proponents shouldn't go out of their way to try to prevent non systemd Linux from existing.

All the changes to gnome, which depended 100% upon systemd at the time, were pushed by redhat, gnome contributers.

This one of the biggest reasons given, for getting systemd into debian at the time.

When systemd was being pushed origionally, fast boot times, predictable names, and a few other things were big reasons. Yet debian already had parallel init booting, and already had predictable interface names.

Systemd has done almost nothing for debian, and has many drawbacks, as you say.

Systemd was a redhat solution, to redhat issues, and redhat used its power in the community to force it through.

There were a lot of outright lies, politics, and more at implementation time. And you're right, part of it was redhat wanting to force systemd, and no other.

But debian has chosen to adopt systemd, so at least some substantial part of Debian developers preferred going with it to keeping the status quo with sysvinit. Maybe they were badly influence by Redhat/Poettering, but it was their call.

Of course they were influenced by the author of programs they use. They were also influenced by Linus Torvalds when they decided to use his kernel. I don't see any problems with this. That's what you do when you make something that you're proud of. You go around to other people and try to convince them to use it.

> It is completely insane and gives lots of fuel to the systemd haters.

Sorry, what exactly is the issue with a bunch of Linux maintainers working for Microsoft? Is there still some sort of collective adjustment issue with Microsoft being a major backer of Linux now? If the maintainers themselves (people who have dedicated their lives to progressing Linux) are ok with it, why does anyone else have an issue?

And what kind of fuel would it add? That systemd has corporate backers?

And what kind of fuel would it add? That systemd has corporate backers?

Systemd was 100% created by redhat, so no, corporate backers aren't the problem.

The real problem is that Microsoft has historically tried to destroy linux, and beyond that, has a huge history of FUD and embrace and extinguish.

Many in the OSS community consider Microsoft to be pure evil.

And if their historical behaviour is any indication, nothing they do with/for Linux will turn out well, or good for the community.

> The real problem is that Microsoft has historically tried to destroy linux, and beyond that, has a huge history of FUD and embrace and extinguish.

And now they're one of the major backers. All the work is being done in the open, so it's not like there's a nefarious hidden agenda there (an agenda that would have needed to somehow stay dormant for 10+ years).

The idea that working for Microsoft is something dirty that should be shunned for open source just doesn't make practical sense.

Pulseaudio was developed in the open. So was systemd, and many take issue with that.

And embrace and extend can exist in OSS models.

Microsoft is dirty, and it is dirt they cannot wash off in a mere few years.

If they behave correctly for 20 years, as long as they behaved in a literally evil fashion, then maybe they have reformed.

Embrace and extend is a fundamental part of the OSS model. That's what you're supposed to do: pick some OSS, make some custom add-ons to it, then upsell it to your customers. The license encourages everyone to do this. Tons and tons of OSS companies are doing this. Microsoft isn't doing anything out of the ordinary here.

Just a reminder holding grudges isn't good for your mental health.

Microsoft pushes ads, surveillance software and broken updates on most Windows users. That they are buying influence in Linux and throwing some money at it does not absolve them. Working for bad behaved corporation isn't laudable unless you're literally saving lives there.

Err that seems like an unreasonable (and child-like) simplification of the world.

Microsoft has done many terrible things. Most companies of that size have. But they have also done a ton of good things. It’s impossible to take a group of tens of thousands of humans and not find rampant examples of both good and terrible things.

Sometimes one outweighs the other and that may sound like where you are but there is a wide gap between doing evil and saving lives, and most of us live somewhere in that gap.

"It's not me doing the bad things, I just work there."

I totally get it – I've watched it all unfold over the last couple of decades.

But everything I see since Nadella has taken over, tells me that they aren't just paying lip service, that they have just realized nearly a decade ago that it's good business to embrace (loaded word) Linux if they have any chance for Azure to succeed, and their moves suggest that's a core part of their future.