If you don't like systemd in general that's one thing, but to claim that systemd only benefits desktops is just wrong. I'm just tired of the "systemd only goal is boot speed" argument. Too many people want to join the crowd and get their old-school linux user credentials by bashing systemd without understanding or acknowledging the benefits.

sysvinit maintainers must love systemd. Before systemd came along there were lots of complaints about what a terrible hack sysvinit is. Now it's a paragon of simplicity and stability without having actually changed any..

If I had a dollar for every time a systemd supporter compared it to upstart without provocation, I'd have exactly zero dollars.

If I had a dollar for every time a systemd supporter reminded us that we need systemd because runsv was a terrible hack, on the other hand...

As a neutral party, one thing I'll say about systemd is at least they understand what a dependency is. I still haven't figured out why the upstart people think it's a good idea for a service to magically start just because its dependencies are fulfilled. Maybe they think system services are like proteins or something.

Someone tell that to RedHat. They consider the network "up" once the device gets link, not when the system gets an IP address. Even in environments without spanning tree, this is a problem due to massive parallelization -- spawning 30 processes 5ms after the network is "up" but doesn't have an IP from DHCP yet.

The solution? Put a sleep 7 in there, thus making the entire process slower than the previous solution.

That's wrong. Read about it at https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/NetworkTar...

So either I use systemd's sleep or my sleep, but either way it's broken out of the box. Great job!

EDIT: RHEL/CentOS only supports NetworkManager for this. Which sucks if you don't want to run NetworkManager (for a litany of reasons).

$ yum whatprovides "*/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service" No matches found

Wow, that's disgusting.

You know, the funny thing is I never exactly considered myself a systemd supporter. I just get tired of the comments from people bashing systemd which are almost always emotional and political rather than technical in nature. Maybe there's good technical arguments for some other system but they get drowned out by the "systemd is a nightmare with zero benefit that was written to make linux a desktop OS" comments..

It's not the best architected system of all time but it's hardly a nightmare. Too monolithic though, and they like to violate the UNIX philosophy.

It wasn't really any better than upstart either, which is why I was mad about seeing ubuntu rip it out in order to replace it with systemd.

The main thing that concerns me most is that systemd is now dominant on virtually every linux platform and without competition it is going to stagnate.

Upstart wasn't perfect but it was decent and it was competition, it worked well for ubuntu and it would have been a better choice for debian (unfortunately the vote was split 50/50 and the tiebreaker guy decided on systemd).

It could well be. I don't have the technical understanding or time to invest in order to make a technical criticism. But I've been fighting it for a year or two, and it hasn't started making more sense yet!

It's because every argument I've seen against systemd is by people who think systemd betrays the Unix philosophy and think we should go back to sysvinit (see rconti above). Upstart had a lot of problems, and the only good technical arguments I've seen in its favor are better compatibility with other kernels. Please point me to a good "Upstart is better than systemd" technical article.

> think we should go back to sysvinit (see rconti above).

Except he didn't. Another good example of the straw man arguments I was talking about. Hating systemd doesn't automatically make you a sysvinit fan.

>Upstart had a lot of problems

The fact that you didn't mention one of them demonstrates just how much you know about this (nothing).

Another good example of the level of technical detail I see in comments from systemd haters, thanks.

Yes, wouldn't a server want to depend on the DESKTOP BUS?

Ok, snarky, yes. Still want to know the answer :)

Also, why is it that the ONLY alternative ever mentioned is sysvinit? Systemd is not the 2nd init system ever invented, nor even the 4th or 5th. There are simpler alternatives.

Binary log files? Don't even get me started.

You think if it wasn't for systemd your server wouldn't need dbus? You wouldn't be running docker on that server either..

I understand that there are people who don't have a use for journald. It strikes me as odd to look at journald's feature set and conclude that this is being driven primarily by desktop support to the exclusion of servers, though.

Frankly i suspect journald is one bother backing the other.

The basic concepts journald is built on is lifted straight out of a doctorate thesis written by Lennart Poettering's brother.

Thinking about i don't think systemd really have a goal. It seems to be a hodgepodge of Poettering itch scratching, Gnome/Fedora/Freedesktop NIH-ing, and a bunch of "because we can" sub-projects.