I manage what people call Large Enterprise. As my side gig, I manage Small Offices / Branch Offices.
I remember how much less… reliable the former alternatives were on my computers.
Remember that systemd is also used on massive server farms that need consistent fast reboots during recovery from vary occasional mishap. These things have all but a stopwatch running.
My god, is systemd ever a piece of crap. Coupled with ‘consistent[ha!] naming’ it’s the single most likely thing to cause a field engineer to scream into the partially-lit datacenter in abject rage and hate. Even more if they remember how fucking sysVinit actually delivered on the promise. Even more if they still remember how well inittab Just Worked.
I read starry-eyed lennartophiles praising the reliability and ease of use and I wonder whether they didn’t know the basics of systemd, or just don’t understand the problems plaguing servers now. Like apple fans, screeching at non-apple users, I worry this lack of understanding causes a very biased approach where issues with apple/systemd are “just impossible to solve” where android/runit issues are “obvious indications why they’re broken systems and should be avoided; and also you’re old if you like them.”
BUT. I dislike having to learn more commands just to read my logs,
You signed up for this.
and systemd timers are awfully complicated when I just needed what cronjobs already did.
You signed up for this.
It’s like those shitty cable bundles where you want HBO Max but also have to buy 4 channels of Golf, 2 of only Nascar-based Reality shows, and one that just shows Real World marathons, over and over; and also have to pay for all 8 .
THE UNIX PHILOSOPHY is to not over-reach the designed purpose. It allows for combinations of tools based on what’s more reliable/current/compatible at the current moment and keeps tools concise. Having things move over to timers from cron or xkcd/927 logging because Lennart and Kay couldn’t be bothered to understand and work with what’s existing, and deciding to replace everything by this growing blob of monolithic dreck, is bad for a reason that’s been proved in the past. And those who are too lazy to read history will elect fascists. or something.
So, I don’t know as much as you do, but I’m wondering; if it’s that bad, why did it ever get popular? It’s not like people who write/program/maintain/deploy Linux aren’t usually very knowledgeable. They’re usually experts and computer scientists. It seems to me, at least, if it’s that bad, it would have never been adopted so widely? Is Systemd pulling a Microsoft and bribing people or something?
My god, is systemd ever a piece of crap. Coupled with ‘consistent[ha!] naming’ it’s the single most likely thing to cause a field engineer to scream into the partially-lit datacenter in abject rage and hate. Even more if they remember how fucking sysVinit actually delivered on the promise. Even more if they still remember how well inittab Just Worked.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but this paragraph in particular resonated. We used to have a clean, simple, and predictable, system. Now we have exciting race conditions, a massively over complicated monolith (“but it’s not”, I hear the Lennart’s fans scream, “you can just install the bits you want”. To them I say “Try it. You’ll soon wish for the sweet release of death. Install a good init system instead”), and once simple tasks being swamped by poorly designed tooling.
I’d say the entire design of it is badly thought out, but that implies there was much though given to it’s design at all. It seems more like it simply coagulated. As another commenter said, it’s become popular because it makes the disto builders’ lives easier, not because it’s better, and that leaves everyone actually using the thing in the lurch.
I’m an older fella who supported BSD systems before transitioning careers, the damn fact that you can’t just read a log file by default was enough to get my hairs up. I like using other simple tools to handle parsing for important info or events as well.
I still subscribe to the philosophy as you put it, a system is only as reliable as it’s components… the sum of simple tools worked way better than systemd ever has in my opinion.
As a developer who got into DevOps and now is learning the vast world of sysadmin stuff, it’s validating to see you say that. Because the damn logging system is my number 1 gripe as well and it discourages me from doing any real digging. Why would I when I can just spin up a new VM?
Thank you for this. I haven’t been any sort of sysadmin in a good long time and when I was, I didn’t manage more than three or four servers. But I am fed up enough with SystemD to finally go to the trouble of switching back from Arch to the Gentoo I used to run and love. And it’s a breath of fresh air dealing with OpenRC (and generally the whole Gentoo ecosystem) again.
Unit files are a pain to deal with. I love that with init scripts, if I can write Bash scripts, I can write init scripts without having to look up every little thing in Google and in man pages.
I won’t say a bad word about Gentoo, I enjoyed running it, but if you want to use sysvinit, Debian works fine with it. There’s a page on the wiki (linked form the install guide) on how to do it here. I’ve not run into any issues over the time I’ve been running like this, and having a clean init system makes my day a lot better.
I manage what people call Large Enterprise. As my side gig, I manage Small Offices / Branch Offices.
Remember that systemd is also used on massive server farms that need consistent fast reboots during recovery from vary occasional mishap. These things have all but a stopwatch running.
My god, is systemd ever a piece of crap. Coupled with ‘consistent[ha!] naming’ it’s the single most likely thing to cause a field engineer to scream into the partially-lit datacenter in abject rage and hate. Even more if they remember how fucking sysVinit actually delivered on the promise. Even more if they still remember how well inittab Just Worked.
I read starry-eyed lennartophiles praising the reliability and ease of use and I wonder whether they didn’t know the basics of systemd, or just don’t understand the problems plaguing servers now. Like apple fans, screeching at non-apple users, I worry this lack of understanding causes a very biased approach where issues with apple/systemd are “just impossible to solve” where android/runit issues are “obvious indications why they’re broken systems and should be avoided; and also you’re old if you like them.”
You signed up for this.
You signed up for this.
It’s like those shitty cable bundles where you want HBO Max but also have to buy 4 channels of Golf, 2 of only Nascar-based Reality shows, and one that just shows Real World marathons, over and over; and also have to pay for all 8 .
THE UNIX PHILOSOPHY is to not over-reach the designed purpose. It allows for combinations of tools based on what’s more reliable/current/compatible at the current moment and keeps tools concise. Having things move over to timers from cron or xkcd/927 logging because Lennart and Kay couldn’t be bothered to understand and work with what’s existing, and deciding to replace everything by this growing blob of monolithic dreck, is bad for a reason that’s been proved in the past. And those who are too lazy to read history will elect fascists. or something.
ITT: systemd haters get overly upset about someone on the internet deciding to use systemd
So, I don’t know as much as you do, but I’m wondering; if it’s that bad, why did it ever get popular? It’s not like people who write/program/maintain/deploy Linux aren’t usually very knowledgeable. They’re usually experts and computer scientists. It seems to me, at least, if it’s that bad, it would have never been adopted so widely? Is Systemd pulling a Microsoft and bribing people or something?
No, it’s much simpler- distro maintainers moved to it because it’s simpler for them to roll out, and they don’t get blamed for the problems.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but this paragraph in particular resonated. We used to have a clean, simple, and predictable, system. Now we have exciting race conditions, a massively over complicated monolith (“but it’s not”, I hear the Lennart’s fans scream, “you can just install the bits you want”. To them I say “Try it. You’ll soon wish for the sweet release of death. Install a good init system instead”), and once simple tasks being swamped by poorly designed tooling.
I’d say the entire design of it is badly thought out, but that implies there was much though given to it’s design at all. It seems more like it simply coagulated. As another commenter said, it’s become popular because it makes the disto builders’ lives easier, not because it’s better, and that leaves everyone actually using the thing in the lurch.
I’m an older fella who supported BSD systems before transitioning careers, the damn fact that you can’t just read a log file by default was enough to get my hairs up. I like using other simple tools to handle parsing for important info or events as well.
I still subscribe to the philosophy as you put it, a system is only as reliable as it’s components… the sum of simple tools worked way better than systemd ever has in my opinion.
As a developer who got into DevOps and now is learning the vast world of sysadmin stuff, it’s validating to see you say that. Because the damn logging system is my number 1 gripe as well and it discourages me from doing any real digging. Why would I when I can just spin up a new VM?
Thank you for this. I haven’t been any sort of sysadmin in a good long time and when I was, I didn’t manage more than three or four servers. But I am fed up enough with SystemD to finally go to the trouble of switching back from Arch to the Gentoo I used to run and love. And it’s a breath of fresh air dealing with OpenRC (and generally the whole Gentoo ecosystem) again.
Unit files are a pain to deal with. I love that with init scripts, if I can write Bash scripts, I can write init scripts without having to look up every little thing in Google and in man pages.
I won’t say a bad word about Gentoo, I enjoyed running it, but if you want to use sysvinit, Debian works fine with it. There’s a page on the wiki (linked form the install guide) on how to do it here. I’ve not run into any issues over the time I’ve been running like this, and having a clean init system makes my day a lot better.