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Comment by binaryapparatus | Hacker News Reader

> opponents are vocal

> bunch of us are silently enjoying

Sorry to have to address this. It very much looks like underhand systemd forum/post control I have seen on a lot of other places. I wouldn't bother to respond but I lived in a former communist country and formulations like this kind of make me twitch.

So number of opponents is very minor but they make lots of noise. While the 'normal' people, those who really enjoy dictate are great majority, alas, not very vocal. This is communist lingo bro.

I am not saying you have anything to do with systemd directly, but this kind of crowd control and logic can be traced all over the internet wherever anybody questions systemd sanity.

Oh my karma points! I must admit I care more about FOSS and Linux health than what I care about my points. Things have to be said.

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> So number of opponents is very minor but they make lots of noise. While the 'normal' people, those who really enjoy dictate are great majority, alas, not very vocal. This is communist lingo bro.

No, this has some basis: http://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf

You never hear anyone going to post "oh wow I love systemd/my dell laptop/this website/" unless specifically asked, or when answering seemingly biased or sometimes incorrect "bad" reviews. I personally enjoy managing my computers much more since systemd.

That's like other technology stacks. For instance, some people were burned by CMake in 2008, didn't try to understand its logic and you still see them complaining on forums up to this day and you may think that this is a shitty unused buildsystem; but when Microsoft and Jetbrains did actual surveys it came out as very strong (more used than make) and growing:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/10/05/cmake-sup...

https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2017/cpp/

"Things have to be said."

Then say them. Simply posting that systemd is bad, and appealing to your position as an experienced UNIX user without giving specifics is just signalling at best.

I probably count as a Veteran System Administrator myself, and personally I am tired of anti-systemd people coming into conversations that have little to do with systemd, and trying to hijack the conversation with content-light posts.

I have used systemd only as one of the data points in overall state of the industry, please read my initial post. It is important point for me because I used to use Linux everywhere and rely on its modularity and security. I am looking at the big picture and how trends correlate, not particularly focused on systemd only. Rest of the conversation emerged because 'silent majority' (lol) focused on systemd only.

You are aware of the feature creep and taking over of every sane unix/linux utility? Usually with very questionable results, changing su or dns resolver, for the worse?

You know about number of vulnerabilities that are introduced by systemd, then dismissed and not-our-bug or wontfix?

You are aware of the tying in systemd with every other program they can get their hands on? That makes harder and harder to run properly secured machine that does not have systemd. Not saying to you since you know system administration but: This is a BAD thing.

You probably know about all vulnerabilities introduced by systemd? Coupled with inability to not use systemd, with its huge attack surface this makes Linux much less secure and monolith.

Back to my initial intention: there is huge trend throughout the industry that kills variety and ties in systems in a monolith mess. Systemd is just one of the data points. I care same way about Oracle buying Sun with one of the main reasons being MySQL. Thanks to MariaDB folks that lock in didn't happen but I was aware they will try it as soon as Oracle got hands on MySQL.

> You probably know about all vulnerabilities introduced by systemd?

You probably know about all vulnerabilities introduced by openrc or sysvinit?

Right you can't since every script itself could have a vulnerability

No need since I can choose what I start, in what order, and I can check every simple script myself. They were short and doing one thing well. Good luck doing that with 300+K lines of code with systemd.

Arguments like this really don't help systemd and show either ignorance or worse.

I’ve got 1400 init scripts my systems, each over 800 lines long, before I switched to systemd

And in a language without linters or typecheckers.

It’s literally easier to read the entire systemd code than trying to debug the interactions between these init scripts, all slightly buggy, interacting in slightly unexpected ways, and working mostly, although they never should.

> I’ve got 1400 init scripts my systems, each over 800 lines long, before I switched to systemd

There is something wrong with those numbers. Can you upload them somewhere or let me know what distro it was? I am curious to take a look.

If there is 1400 of them, each over 800 lines long then you have 1.1M lines of init script code, which doesn't seem right.

How many of them did you use daily? All 1400? 5? 10? Because checking sanity of ten of them, even if they are whooping 800+ lines of code (I'll have to see that) can't be compared to over 300K lines of monolithic systemd.

> How many of them did you use daily? All 1400? 5? 10? Because checking sanity of ten of them, even if they are whooping 800+ lines of code (I'll have to see that) can't be compared to over 300K lines of monolithic systemd.

All of them, it was over several servers, running different distros, with similar services, all with similar but slightly different init scripts for the same packages, and all having to interoperate. All scripts from the distro’s packages.

All of them were running daily, and many of them were constantly causing issues.

In fact, I have a single sysvinit script left on my systems, and it’s exactly that one that doesn’t work reliably.

Had a hard time not to downvote this post. Yes, it is. But just use systemd and you'll see that it's actually quite good.

I have been using systemd on Arch since (I think) 2012. As soon as it was available anyway. Is that enough of systemd experience? No, it is sadly not quite good.

Which you apparently can give zero arguments for.

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