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Comment by bitJericho | Hacker News Reader

Wtf is the matter with these systemd guys? Why on earth does anybody put up with this software?

SystemD is a Linux cancer that continues to grow uncheked. If this keeps up, a base Linux system will be nothing more than the Kernel, Systemd, and Bash.

My biggest concern is that distros like Debian and CentOS, whose goals normally include stability to the point that they are often railed against for including old, sometimes too old software, have adopted Systemd before it had any real rollout and experience.

I could see distros like arch, that want to test new stuff and are known to work on bleeding edge software would make sense.

> My biggest concern is that distros like Debian and CentOS, whose goals normally include stability to the point that they are often railed against for including old, sometimes too old software, have adopted Systemd before it had any real rollout and experience.

That's a bit disingenuous, Fedora 15 (released May 2011) was the first distribution to enable systemd by default, so there were at least 2 years of "rollout and experience" when Debian 8 (April 2015) and CentOS 7 (July 2014) switched. And at least in the case of Debian, it was already available as an option since 2012.

2 years on one distro (that as far as I know, isn't popular for server-based infrastructure) is not what I would consider "real rollout or experience".

And yes, while available in debian, very few people used it for the reasons I'm talking about: it hasn't been heavily tested.

You can't blame CentOS for switching. Their goal is to create as close to a bit-for-bit rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as possible.

Which strengths the original point. RHEL is suppose to be rock-solid. systemd is not (technical issues aside, it's new and should be vetted more thoroughly), and I have no idea why RH and Debian are staking so much on it. That's what bothers me.

RH can get away with it because they still offer support for the RHEL 6.x line.

Debian ramming systemd into stable like they did on the other hand...

I can't believe you wrote this with actual seriousness. The debate took place over an entire year.

Debate, sure. But how long did it sit as default before it officially shipped?

You are getting cancer from being offered some software for free? That sound a bit hyperbolic to me. No one is forced to used anything, the old alternatives are still there, and distributions like Debian supports both new and old.

Don't worry, I'm sure shelld is on the agenda. After all, why pass around text commands when your shell can send binary D-bus messages?

They put up with it because other key parts of the Linux ecosystem now depend on it, like the Gnome desktop environment and soon udev which handles device detection on all desktop and server Linux systems.

Actually udev got merged with systemd some years back, as both past and current maintainer of udev is buddy buddy with Poettering (and staunch believers in one-true-way-ism).

This is what lead to Gentoo effectively forking udev into eudev, so that they could go on offering the distro users a choice in inits.

This because the process for extracting udev from the larger systemd code blob would change with every release, and thus requiring manual intervention.

In essence, the systemd devs are playing dirty. And because they are making the life of some other devs easier by offering tasty APIs, the project keeps agglomerating power like some kind of shoggoth.

I am damn sure that once kdbus comes into play, there will be moves made to make systemd the sole arbiter between kernel and userspace. Effectively enveloping the kernel.

Because it works, and works well and in 14 years it's the best I've ever had to deal with. Everyone is just throwing FUD around as per usual in a systemd thread.

I don't. The Linux ecosystem is no longer salvageable, so I've started moving to FreeBSD. This should buy me another 20 years, after which I won't be bothered anyway.

Likewise, but OpenBSD here.

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