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The irony of the eroding the UNIX philosophy from Linux is that most real UNIX systems, meaning AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, NeXTSTep (cough macOS), Tru64,... do have something similar to systemd.

Sometimes shouting "UNIX philosophy" in GNU/Linux forums reminds me of emigrants that keep traditions of their home countries alive that are long out of fashion back home.

commercial unixes haven't been relevant for decades. Unix is linux these days.

How about the second largest desktop OS in the world, OS X (or now macOS)? That's BSD.

OSX is actually a certified UNIX http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

and systemd was modelled partially after its launchd

Mac OS X is not BSD: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths

Actually not from the point of view of our enterprise customers, the same that still happily pay for mainframes.

For me at least, unix philosophy is Thompson, Ritchie, Raymond, Stevens, etc., not some obscure commercial things.

Which validates my point of long gone traditions.

The world isn't a PDP-11 anymore.

The sarcastic irony is, Solaris engineers implemented a fully functional systemd(8) long before systemd(8) by designing and implementing SMF, which went on to break world records with startup and shutdown speed, on what is now an ancient AMD Opteron system (I think it was either v20z or a v40z). I wanted to include the reference to the slashdot's then-article, but try as I might, I can't find it any more.

XML and CDDL, yuck and yuck.

Go drool some more over Cantrill, will you?

No, you're actually wrong, IIRC.

The other systems still fundamentally do init's job, as well as managing services. They DON'T do everything, including:

-replace cron

-handle dynamic device files (udev's job)

-set the hostname

-replace syslog

-replace inetd

-automount

-anything I forgot

AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and NeXTStep were not written by the original authors of Unix and its philosophy. Linux has always been closer to the philosophy than many of these, actually. So much so that it has imported concepts from the successor of Unix, Plan9. Linux's procfs which exposes sysinfo as files within the filesystem is a concept taken from Plan9, which was the OS people like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike envisioned as the future of OSes and replacement for Unix.

Those "traditions" you're speaking of not only are not outdated, but they never were fully realized to their ideal outside of Plan9, which attempted to make everything accessible through file APIs.

The suckless crowds are not about reproducing the original Unix. They are about carrying the torch of that philosophy, and the original unix was just the beginning, not an end in itself. Here's an example of software from suckless that follows Plan9 : http://tools.suckless.org/ii/

Actually the only thing I find positive about Plan9 is that it gave birth to Inferno and Limbo, both of which don't have much to do with UNIX philosophy.

Those that worship Plan 9 as the UNIX culture, should actually be aware what the authors think about UNIX.

"I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!

I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. "

https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...

I don't believe Mac OS X/OS X/macOS's launchd is as complicated as systemd.

Ubuntu 16.04 is not meant for lightweight machines - for example, the Unity desktop assumes you have 3D acceleration (which sucks for using in a VM). It's not systemd that makes your atom netbook slow (well, assuming you're using Unity...)

Re: systemd itself, I could care less about the bells and whistles, but every time I go back to fiddle with a sysv init script, I yearn for either of upstart or systemd...

Ubuntu actually has a low graphics mode so that it can be used in VMs

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/09/19/low-graphics-mode-in-...

I stand corrected. Maybe I'm thinking of 14.04?

Nope, Xfce on all the Linux distros on that machine, except for Elementary. I was surprised to find that Elementary's Pantheon was faster than Xfce on Ubuntu 16.04.

Besides, it wasn't a test of DE performance alone, it was a combination of factors including boot time, script run time, video encode/decode, build from source time, and so on. Yes, DE performance was also a metric, and for fun I did load Unity on both 14.04 and 16.04 just to see what would happen. If I were basing it on DE performance alone and used the default DE for each distro, both Ubuntu versions would be the slowest by far.

Also, 3D acceleration was not an issue, the Intel video hardware in that machine is fully accelerated in Linux and OpenBSD.

It didn't just start growing. There was talk of it being the base of the OS (excluding the kernel) since 2012 (as mentioned here http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd-update-3.html).

> We have been working hard to turn systemd into the most viable set of components to build operating systems, appliances and devices from, and make it the best choice for servers, for desktops and for embedded environments alike. I think we have a really convincing set of features now, but we are actively working on making it even better.

I'm pretty sure I saw others posts, but my googlefu is a bit weak.

So, the expansion was in the plan from nearly the beginning (for good or ill)

> There was talk of it being the base of the OS

To be fair, that's pretty much the definition of an init system, innit?

Thanks for that. When I had first heard of it back in 2012, it was right after getting my first Raspberry Pi, and a friend had suggested trying to port systemd to it to improve boot speed. At that time, all I was able to find out about systemd was that it was a faster init. There was nothing I saw back then about the authors wanting to replace all of GNU with it. It was several months later, after the update to systemd broke my Arch installation, that I started reading about how it's growing too fast and rather than focus on code quality and stability, the authors were rushing to make it this huge replacement for GNU.

Since then I've followed its progress, and while my overall impression remains slightly negative, I'm hoping it improves to the point that it is stable and mature enough for daily use. Until then, I happily run Slackware for serious work and Windows 10 for games.

When Linux came along in the mid-90s, most commercial Unixes had left behind the Unix philosophy, with their own integrated, object oriented desktop environments and sophisticated administration tools. Only Xenix, the engine that powered many an auto shop's rinky-dink five-user database setup, stuck with the model of text terminals and CLI administration with simple tools.

Of course Linux took off, and it sort of reset everything back to stone knives and bearskins. But systemd itself is modelled on Solaris SMF, which is world-class industrial grade service management for large server deployments.

Appeals to the "Unix Philosophy" are the province of reactionary greybeards. Unix philosophy means nothing in the modern era.

Out of curiosity, what were you using to measure the speed of the various operating systems you mentioned?

For CLI stuff (compiling, file operations etc) it's the time command, for video decode/encode it's built into ffmpeg, and for graphical stuff it's mostly subjective. There's honestly not a ton of difference on most of the CLI stuff since the hardware is the same, but it is measurable. As for the DE, let's just say that Xfce under Slackware and OpenBSD is quick and peppy while Xfce under Debian-based distros is anything but. Ubuntu seemed to be the slowest for that test, and Elementary's Pantheon desktop is a mixed bag. I have considered running the Phoronix test suite for a more accurate result.

Also note that I did have to tweak OpenBSD a little to get it on par with Slackware on the desktop, though the stock install is still faster than the more "modern" Linuxen for most tasks.

And for those who wonder why I do all of this: It's a hobby. It's more fun than watching TV on my off days, and it keeps me up to date on the latest goings-on in the OS world.

>There's honestly not a ton of difference on most of the CLI stuff since the hardware is the same, but it is measurable.

This is what I was after. I can't imagine ffmpeg running slower just because of systemd or unity. But yeah, if you're running on a 2010 netbook I wouldn't be surprised if it ran better under Xfce.

I'm an Ubuntu LTS user. Compared to Upstart in 14.04, Systemd is an improvement. ;)

Upstart solves the same sysv-init problems that was the motivation for systemd.

And systemd should be an improvement - it started after upstart, and hit production well after upstart :)

I am also an Ubuntu LTS user, but more a developer than a system administrator.

I have migrated from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 recently. I am using a NAS drive. After my do-release-upgrade -d, internet was not working anymore because of systemd circularity problem. I had to learn how to create systemd configuration files to describe remote filesystem mounts. It was not easy to find documentation on systemd.

When my computer enters in sleep mode, I can wake it with a press on enter. The next time, it enters in sleep mode, I can not wake it up anymore.

My system used to boot in high resolution. Now, it is using huge fonts that makes boot message impossible to read (25 lines on a 23" screen!). I still do not know how to fix it.

It may not be only the fault of systemd, but migration from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS was a very bad experience for me.

Ubuntu upgrades almost always suck, but the upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04 was the worst I ever saw. Nothing worked, my system was broken beyond rescue. Pulseaudio all over again.

> gets progressively slower with each systemd update

Windows 10 will not be left behind! I mean, ahead!

Microsoft recently pushed out the Anniversary Update, which made at least my Win10 laptop noticeably - as in extra 10 or 15 seconds - slower waking up, and generally more sluggish here and there.

(How convenient, 400 million PCs need an upgrade now. Mwahahaha.)

I am puzzled that you had an Atom based netbook from around 2010 that shipped with any kind of Windows 10.

That was a typo, it shipped with Windows 7 Starter. Fixed now, thanks! :-)

> Ubuntu 16.04 on my modern workstation gets progressively slower with each systemd update

I hadn't noticed a noticeable slowdown on my Ubuntu 16.04. I wouldn't even know about the controversy except people keep mentioning it.