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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

Systemd is the disaster that happens when we ignore the lessons of UNIX.

UNIX is all about small, composable tools. Do one job and do it well.

One of these tools didn't stand up to the test of time (SysV init) and needed to be replaced.

We could have chosen one of the mature candidates (upstart, runit, minit) or even built a great new one from scratch. Life would have been good.

But instead we ended up with this trainwreck of a monolith that not only replaced init, but at the same time tried to reinvent almost every critical userspace daemon from Syslog to NTP.

It predictably failed on every metric.

Now it is time for the major Linux distributions to conclude this experiment, roll back the Systemd mistake and return to the modularity that made UNIX successful.

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Perhaps someone can explain why it was chosen as the replacement for SysV init, when all of the parent's comments/critiques of systemd were known in advance of it being pulled into major distros.

Bundling.

systemd as a package is more than just init.

It is init, inetd, session manager (logind), udev, dns client, dhcp client, cron, su, and the list keeps growing.

Basic thing is that first of all Poettering to it a toehold at Fedora (he works at Red Hat, so surprise surprise). Then he offered Gnome the code for supporting logind on a silver platter.

End result is that to offer Gnome as the desktop you either have to patch it, shim it (ask Canonical how well that worked out) or adopt systemd.

Effectively what is happening is that Fedora is becoming the de-facto standard for Linux. In part because it is effectively the testing distro for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus a large portion of userland devs (and a number of kernel devs) use it as their "dogfood".

This attitude does not match history. If Unix really was about that philosophy, we would have never seen tools like emacs and perl gain any sort of popularity.

UNIX philosophy[1] is not about popularity but about choice.

We get to choose between Emacs/Vim, Perl/Python, Syslog-ng/RSyslog, ntpd/openntpd and so on.

This has resulted in multiple mature implementations for every core system task.

Yet instead of sticking with this code that has stood the test of time over decades, we threw it all out for a poorly written jack of all trades that gives root to usernames starting with a digit...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Origin

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