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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Not the person you're asking, but I'm curious what you mean when you say "the alternatives".

I've used runit, openrc, briefly upstart (what a trashfire that was), and I don't miss a single thing about them while writing systemd unit files.

I've used GNU Shepherd on Guix, and honestly, meh, systemd feels way more pragmatic.

I've also used systemd-networkd as well as NetworkManager, and feel like they both still have a few warts, but overall prefer systemd-networked on servers.

I've used grub, refit, and systemd-boot, and gotta say systemd-boot is my preference there too.

I haven't really used systemd portable services, but I've used docker and don't like it, and my overall impression is I'll probably like portable services more.

Are there other alternatives I have to use before I'm allowed to have an opinion? What alternatives have you used which made you feel so enlightened?

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Personally, it's not that the alternatives are so awesome.

It's when i meet against some awful design choices in systemd, like how it decides to wait forever rather than hard fail, and by wait forever, i mean wait for 30 seconds, no, 1 minute 30 seconds, no 5 minutes... you get it.

Or you can easily lock yourself out when there's a typo in /etc/fstab.

Or the hardcoded 5 minute timeout for sysv-generator: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/sysv-genera...

God forbid you used cgroupsv1 for anything when poettering unilaterally decided to punish everyone with a 30 second delay for using it.

If you stray off of the intended opinionated path, be prepared for the least user-friendly experience linux has to offer. You might even get some abuse from the developers if you try to ask for help, but they've probably toned it down since CoC became a thing (I hope).

God forbid you used cgroupsv1 for anything when poettering unilaterally decided to punish everyone with a 30 second delay for using it.

Intentional time-delays are a nice middle ground. Yes, it is annoying to the users who've ignored all prior deprecation warnings, but it's better than those same users being "surprised" when support is removed entirely. Maybe you'd consider it less of a "punishment" if systemd dropped support for cgroupsv1 outright instead of inserting a time delay, I believe the opposite.

> What alternatives have you used which made you feel so enlightened?

I didn't mean to seem like I feel so enlightened.

My experience is that when not using systemd, I regularly get screwed by what I would call the "imperialist culture" of systemd, for lack of better words: it doesn't feel like you can relatively easily extract subcomponents of systemd and use it standalone. And more and more projects depend on a particular subcomponent of systemd, meaning that they require systemd.

So it's not so much that I believe systemd is technically worse than the alternatives. It's more the philosophy that I don't like.

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