Moz

Authored Comments

Hehe, I'm looking forward to them. OpenRC first if you get chance Seth; on the other hand MX Linux seems to be getting popular these days so maybe it has to be SysV, which will also satisfy those of us still running Slackware.

systemd....

- Lead developer la-la's to himself and rubs his ears frantically when somebody brings a valid issue to the table.
- No longer sees it's task as an init system but an entire ecosystem of it's own with far too much integration and applications dependent upon it.
- It's success was based around forcing it's use through big name distros that were already established with large user bases. They had no choice other than to accept the decision of their distros development team.
- In real life use finding errors or broken processes (particularly with application startup) is a nightmare. If it wasn't, the numerous Linux and dev forums wouldn't be full of systemd issues about the same thing. Seriously, look at the small number of tutorials it takes to explain basic OpenRC or SysV startup scripts, then compare with the number of threads where a user can't get a Python script starting up through systemd, maintained in service and errors easily discovered and understood.

Seth, this article is well written and detailed as most of yours are, but suggesting others write articles about the init system they use is avoiding what the commenters are trying to tell you. They don't use another init, they use systemd, because they have no choice; and you already know this to defend your article with.

Before systemd you could swap inits out however you pleased. Sure, you've got to rewrite your config scripts and startups but it wouldn't prevent you installing an application. For example, Devuan is supposed to be Debian with systemd pulled out. Try installing a selection of 10 .deb packages in it and see how many just work. And coming from the other side see how many users can get their systemd service files working first time on a self-written script or from-source package when it used to be as easy as a one-line cron-job and a bash script.