LLM slop detected
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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You motherfucker I can barely breathe right now!
Did somebody let Lennart out again? You know he shouldn't be walking around alone outside, he's just going to get himself into trouble.
On a slightly more serious note: systemd does some things nice, a lot of things it does very badly, and it really seriously needs to stop trying to push it's grubby little fingers into every sub system out there.
All that is one thing, but the main issue with systems always seemed it's main developer, Lennart Poetteting who was never one to shy away from drama and controversy, and not in a good way.
ew ai “””art”””
Fucking slop images contributed less than nothing to the article.
/etc/init.d, uh, finds a way
Logged logs logging loggily
Go off, king. Great point. I can't bring myself to give a shit about anything this person has to say if they feel the need to interject Marvel quips into their own article.
Jurassic Park.
Not sure about the other one, but I don't shun people for having their fun. Technical articles can be quite dry.
I recognize the reference, and am also not actually against people having joy in their lives.
My problem is with the use of a tool that is built on a corpus of unlicensed works (regardless of how you feel about the current copyright system, which imo is broken af) and has caused significant environmental and economic damage to the world.
Systemd killed my father, but it's okay because he was Darth Vader anyway.
I tried to stop worrying and love systemd, but it really is terrible to deal with sometimes.
I honestly don't get what people were so up in arms about, besides just not wanting to change what already worked for them.
Systemd inserted a lot of flaws, many of them highly unsecure, for basically no reason other than "easier",
The main developer being a microslop emoyee and getting windfall from other corporate entities didn't sync up that great for integrity or security conscious people.
I'm so tired of reading this stupid argument. "People only dislike systemd because they're afraid of change." No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here's the real issue:
Do you really think it's a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?
Let's consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users' default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn't conform to its "standards" in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome's engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.
That's exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.
Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do....
But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering's new startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Poettering's new startup:
Amutable - verifiable system integrity
Btw, i'm stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?
Btw, i’m stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?
Of course! The EEE pattern is crystal clear at this point. The loss of the WWW to the current browser monoculture we're experiencing is the biggest technological tragedy of our times. I would hate to see it happen with our open source revolution as well.
There are now multiple alternatives that do a better job at what Systemd does.
What is it always with Systemd-is-the-only-alternative (vs. SysV scripts)? That's 15 years out of date.
Also, you don't need sockets.
It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.
That’s not to say it’s bad, just a different design. It’s actually very similar to what Apple did with OS X.
On the plus side, it’s much easier to understand from a security model perspective, but it breaks some of the underlying assumptions about how scheduling and running processes works on Linux.
So: more elegant in itself, but an ugly wart on the overall systems architecture design.
On the plus side, it’s much easier to understand from a security model perspective
Lol, no. Way more code in Systemd. Also more CVE per year than in some bad (now dead) init/svc' lifetime.
It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.
I think that's exactly it for most people. The socket, mount, timer unit files; the path/socket activations; the After=, Wants=, Requires= dependency graph, and the overall architecture as a more unified 'event' manager are what feels really different than most everything else in the Linux world.
That coupled with the ini-style VerboseConfigurationNamesForThatOneThing and the binary journals made me choose a non-systemd distro for personal use - where I can tinker around and it all feels nice and unix-y. On the other hand I am really thankful to have systemd in the server space and for professional work.
I'm not great at any init things, but systemd has made my home server stuff relatively seamless. I have two NASs that I mount, and my server starts up WAY faster than both of them, and I (stupidly) have one mount within the other. So I set requirements that nasB doesn't mount until nasA has, then docker doesn't start until after nasB is mounted. Works way better than going in after 5 minutes and remounting and restarting.
Of course, I did just double my previous storage on A, so I could migrate all of Bs stuff back. But that would require a small amount of effort.
what do you use as a prerequisite for the nas A mount? or does it iust keep trying in a loop?
I have a wait-for-ping service that pings nas A, once it gets a successful response it tries to mount.
I lifted it from a time when I needed to ping my router because Debian had a network-online service bug. I adapted it to my nas because the network-online issue eventually got fixed and mounting my shares became the next biggest issue.
It seems like this person might have grabbed that same fix for what I eventually did because our files are...oddly almost exactly the same.
I've started doing podman quadlets recently, and the ini config style is ugly as hell compared to yaml (even lol) in docker compose. The benefits outweigh that though imho.
I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I'm not sure that's the ini style's fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.
Technically, sysv everything was just a file full of instructions for the shell to parse and initialize. Human readable "technically". It was simple and light weight. SystemD is a bit heavier and more complex as a system service binary. But that load and complexity is generally offset by added features that are extremely nice to have. Providing much more standardized targets and configuration iirc.
I had to search and dig trying to figure out how to set up services properly for my distro, back in the 90s. And when/how to start/restart them. There wasn't one way to do it all. SysD made it all much more standard, simple, and clear. It's biggest sin, is that it's one more binary attack surface that might be exploited.
Openrc, Runit, s6, dinit...
Why are binaries uniquely attackable in a way that init scripts aren't?
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Yeah, sysv init is all just scripts under the hood, and it's a bit fragile/arcane. You have to write a bunch of files by hand, reference them correctly, and place and link them in the right directories. Systemd is a bit better, I have to admit that.
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Its success is mitigated by how difficult it makes networking with . All I want to do is write out the config and have it work. I don't want networkd or resolved mucking around with stuff. You end up having problems like this guy: https://piefed.social/c/linux/p/1796382/oddness-with-systemd-resolved
The day i had to debug DNS issues was the day i ditched systemd.
I don’t think I could name one thing that systemd improved for me. But I can name at least one major annoyance that made things worse for me.
The real issue is the backwards incompatibility which essentially forced everyone to switch instead of being able to choose.
For that alone I will keep disliking it.
Not specifically about systemd, but some things can't be backwards compatible because they might want to just do things different.
Nobody was forced to change, the distros saw the options and decided in favor of systemd, the same they decide a million other things.
Systemd usually can't be in the same repo with other init systems/service managers (or with shims and hacks) *, while they themselves happily coexist. This is the Reason that there are non-systemd distros, not some unreasonable hate for new thing or anything.
* Yes, except Openrc, which was made as a drop-in for Systemd.
Nobody was forced to change,
Red hat dominated the market and pushed it on out. You must remember this, don't you?
I'd encourage you to go read the discussions Arch Linux and Debian had before deciding to go with systemd
Edit: fix grammar
Any recommendations for a good book or online resource to learn about systemd? Not "how to use it" or "ten tricks for systemd users", but how it works, what makes it tick, basically a systematic overview, end then a dive into the details.
Diving into Systemd would be a book written by Nietzsche.
"Und wenn du lange in Systemd blickst, blickt Systemd auch in dich hinein."
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this one is gonna be controversial.
Yup.
can someone please tell me how to make .mount files start at boot for smb shares ffs? is the only thing systemd is failing for me.
I dont know what you are doing, but I have my smb shares simply in fstab and never heard of any .mount file
On modern systems, fstab entries are read by systemd and .mount files are automatically created for each entry. 😄
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https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Samba#As_systemd_unit
That's the guide I followed on my desktop and laptop.
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