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Comment by 7bit | Hacker News Reader

The scale is humongous? Syszemd is not one big thing. It's a collection of small things, each meticoulsouy documented and you can pick and choose.

If you still think there is only one Systemd, maybe learn about the tool instead of just talking others after their mouth.

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that's wrong in the sense it won't be useful for anything unless you have a dozen of those small things setup in the very specific way the author envisioned you set them up.

you seem to be repeating all the marketing, while mentioning in other comments you never understood any init system. i don't think you're the authority to be adding so many comments here.

Yes, systemd not being a monolith is a myth.

You can forward logs to rsyslog or something, but you really can't disable systemd-journald. Technically you don't need to run systemd-boot, you can use grub or something else, but then bootctl and systemd kexec stop working. You don't need to run dbus, but if you don't several systemd features break, and it's not even documented what needs it. The list goes on and on.

Also, the fact that all components are in the same repository and need to be built together causes a lot of headaches with packaging due to dependency cycles (like, systemd -> cryptsetup -> lvm2 -> udev -> systemd).

Systemd is literally not a monolith because it's not one big piece of software. It's a collection of software. For example, systemd-boot has basically nothing to do with systemd-init.

Yes, some software is more tightly coupled than others, naturally. systemd-init and systemd-journald work tightly together because logging is a core requirement of any init system.

It's literally not a monolith, but in practice it may well be, that was my point.

I think that mostly comes down to distro choice and a lot of distros are more than okay with systemd soup. That’s the beauty of OSS, you can always choose not-Fedora ;)

Just the PID 1 manager is multiple times larger in LoC than any alternative. There is no metric in which systemd is more lightweight that I could find.

I'm not sure this is true in practice, if we're counting init scripts themselves. Which we should, because init scripts are code and they often re-implement standard systemd features. Usually in wonky, broken ways.

I think that even if we count init scripts which are way different level of complexity than C LoC, the Systemd would still be larger. Especially if we count just the scripts that are deployed.

What about other init systems? The GP said "any alternative." I am not familiar with how complex they are but was under the impression that there are a number much simpler than sysv init?

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