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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

SystemD is great when it works, which is most of the time. But when it breaks or you have to do something that SystemD doesn't support it becomes an enormous pain in the ass. It's like being back in Windows land again.

Some DBus message is not appearing and it stalls out your boot process, finding where it was supposed to come from and why it didn't appear is a nightmare. If you want to use a different daemon than the one SystemD provides for some service it will fight you every step of the way, sometimes even undoing whatever you had to do to make the process work in a random update. As someone who experiments with weird networking stuff from time to time I've been kicked in the nuts by NetworkManager on several occasions.

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I know this is a completely unimportant tangent. But I'm always amused that systemd skeptics insist on the "SystemD" spelling. Where does that come from? I never see anybody talk about NtpD, InetD or VsftpD. But somehow systemd needs to be SystemD. As I said, amusing.

I'm pretty sure it's just ingroup signaling: it's not the only example of "spelling something wrong because you really hate it". For years I've seen people on forums who want to show their dislike say "MAC" instead of "Mac", "MicroSoft" and so on.

In what way is strange capitalization of a technical word usement indicative specifically of hate within a group of haters?

And what does this mean of the amateur radio operators who call themselves HAMs?

Well if people are unhappy about MAC adresses on Macs, that's their perogative.

> As someone who experiments with weird networking stuff from time to time I've been kicked in the nuts by NetworkManager on several occasions.

nit: NetworkManager is not the one provided by systemd in the first place - that's systemd-networkd.

That aside I do wierd networking stuff for a living and here's how I see the available tooling:

* NetworkManager - great for a laptop where you're moving between networks and don't need anything too fancy.

* systemd-networkd - great for servers and other mostly static networking setups, even weird ones.

* If you're doing anything weird dynamically (e.g. experimenting) - disable the above or move the interfaces you are experimenting on to a fresh netns and do everything by hand with the ip command (and maybe udchpc or dhclient if you need a dhcp client, but be aware of how to write your own callback scripts for how to handle various associated events).

Now for the weird part: Redhat wrote both NM and sd-nd, and decided what servers really need is NM by default, and getting a server to actually use sd-nd is like pulling teeth on RHEL. Completely baffling.

I don't know why Redhat would do that, but I've never used RHEL - I quit the redhat and derivatives in the 90's due to rpm hell, and never looked back.

NetworkManager can read old style sysconfig network configuration, which is still used to this very day even if Red Hat wishes you wouldn't, and you really shouldn't.

systemd-networkd also has the big advantage in using the same config for all distributions. No weird Debian or Redhat config pain.

I'm not keen on the network config being scattered across a dozen tiny files. It makes it hard to see what's going on, or to spot a configuration error.

Also true.

And that’s why Canonical came up with Netplan because otherwise things would get boring.

Yes, but then NetworkManger will override Netplan sometimes but not others. There is a setting in one of the buried config files to configure this behavior, but it doesn't always work depending on how NetworkManager is feeling that day.

Here's one for you: I can't remember the exact details, but I was trying to get do something with a samba share folder via systemd unit file and the way systemd handles the escape characters used by the samba client was not compatible for windows network shares that used spaces in the name.

Yah, Networkmanager is a rootkit.

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