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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

>Besides all this, the main issue, for me, is how it managed to spread and ingrain itself into distributions making them dependent on it.

I don't think the phrasing is correct. Your choice of word (spread/ingrain itself) seems to imply there is malicious intent. Software do not sneak itself into distribution by themselves. It is the other way around. Distribution creators have total freedom on what components/software they find useful to build their distributions on. If a majority of distros decided to use systemd, that mean a majority of people maintaining distributions found the positive outcomes of using systemd were worth dealing with any disadvantage it may had over using another solution.

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> Your choice of word (spread/ingrain itself) seems to imply there is malicious intent. Software do not sneak itself into distribution by themselves.

No, you're right: It's people that do that. And those definitely can have intent (often benevolent, sometimes malicious, other times just so misguided as to be in-effect-malicious).

So let's go with "the main issue is how some people managed to spread and ingrain it into distributions making them dependent on it."

Does that make it much better?

This isn't true. A lot of higher level stuff (e.g. GNOME) assumes systemd.

Which they chose for a reason.

> seems to imply there is malicious intent

There is. Well, sort of.

For example, we had cron working just fine for decades . We had sshd listen on its port for decades. We had fstab for decades. No one wanted systemd-timesyncd.

In my opinion, all these aux systemd projects came to life purely out of psychological reasons. Can we label them malicious?

Cron may have been working, but it had numerous deficiencies that could not be fixed. For example, there's no mechanism for preventing long-running jobs from piling up, you're on your own for logging and figuring out handling for failed jobs, and there's a litany of papercuts from differences in implementation across distros. Systemd timers solve all of those issues, while also granting access to all the other service-inherited benefits like cgroup isolation and resource control. In terms of features, reliability, and simplicity, cron is a poor substitute, and systemd timers really has no rival.

I agree that all of these are valid concerns.

Which we somehow did not have for the last few decades. I wonder why.

The reason is business demands. Maybe it's not the sexiest reason for ideological users or simple PC operators, but it's undeniably why systemd is the standard now. Enterprise applications (which comprise the vast majority of Linux users) needed to aggregate their reliability and observability data of their servers to deploy faster and keep their backend healthy.

There was a time, in the 1990s, when UNIX heavily leaned into the idea of multiuser multiprocessing. That philosophy is pretty much dead in a world that prioritizes networked systems, Docker images and idempotent deployment. Most Linux boxen are cattle, not pets.

> Which we somehow did not have for the last few decades. I wonder why.

Speak for yourself. Lots of us spent many man-months over years engineering around crusty 80s abstractions that no longer worked.

We had UNIX working fine, all these aux GNU projects came to life purely out of psychological reasons. Can we label them malicious?

> If a majority of distros decided to use systemd, that mean a majority of people maintaining distributions found the positive outcomes of using systemd were worth dealing with any disadvantage it may had over using another solution.

This is overall fairly weak evidence that users actually find the software to be of quality. Surely there's got to be a stronger signal that this is a positive way forward, like users enthusiastically saying "wow this is an improvement".

Weak?

I find it hard to imagine objective evidence more robust than the real-world actions of subject matter experts who make real-world decisions. This would have been hotly debated within teams of Linux experts at Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora/RHEL, SuSE, and Arch. These aren't armchair experts who debate on the internet, they're the ones who actually make decisions and, more than most, wear the consequences of those decisions.

> like users enthusiastically saying "wow this is an improvement".

Who are the users in this case?

Yes, systemd is wow, it's a major improvement.

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