I keep on hearing this overly worn "Unix Philosophy" argument against systemd, which in the absence of any non-religious technical justification, basically boils down to "its different".
All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly brought upon themselves. Had they just been more humble about their creation and waited until it was mature and well-tested and did all the wonderful things they claim it could and should do instead of stuffing what was widely seen as a broken-by-design piece of garbage down everybody's throat, maybe much of the Linux community wouldn't have been nearly so outraged by it.
Nobody shoved anything down anyone's throat, least not the SystemD developers. And the same goes for PulseAudio, DBUS, and all the other projects on freedesktop.org.
Anyway, in reality, software does not become mature and well-tested without early exposure to real users and systems. Chicken-and-egg problem there.
I feel absolutely no sympathy for those who are outraged. There are many distributions out there (including Devuan) which align with their particular vision of an OS should be.
Instead they implement it poorly, have had various problems with it, and of course there have been security problems with it.
Do you really want an init system that replaces a ton of functionality poorly like dns, ntp, syslog, xinetd, etc etc etc?
SystemD is not just an "init" system. You have to look at the larger vision for it being a set of building blocks for Linux system and service management.
I think this is a very good thing. Its about time that Linux had a unified and self-consistent approach to system management and configuration.
This was not the way it was sold. It was originally sold as an init replacement.
If at the start the systemd guys had come out and said, "We aim to replace much of the core of Linux with some kind of Windows-Linux conglomoration: replace not only init but dns, syslog, turn all system log files binary, replace intetd, fuck with account naming, and oh, by the way, there'll be no easy way for distros that go with systemd to give their users a choice to use something else" then I'm not so sure how many people would have gotten onboard.
Basically, systemd has been a retooling of the core Linux ecosystem by people who think they know better. Well, this might be news for systemd fans, but they don't necessarily know any better than the rest of us, and the rest of us would like some choice in the matter. Instead we're force fed systemd and our operating system are no longer Linux but some bastardization of Linux and Windows.
"Nobody shoved anything down anyone's throat, least not the SystemD developers."
Tell that to the significan number of RedHat, Debian, and CentOS users who strongly object to systemd yet are forced to use it because that's all their distro supports.
"Anyway, in reality, software does not become mature and well-tested without early exposure to real users and systems. Chicken-and-egg problem there."
You don't have to test it out on all RedHat users, all Debian users, all CentOS, etc, etc. Getting a bunch of volunteers and letting them use a feature-complete version for five or six years before springing it on the rest of us would have been a good start. Instead you get an ever-morphing and ever-growing trojan horse.
1) Debian does support sysvinit right now, although with some packages having hard dependencies on systemd it might not be long before you hit a brick wall.
2) systemd (the init) was used by Fedora for a long time before getting into RHEL/CentOS- which is of course before it got into Debian. So there were volunteers.
Many people did, and didn't like what they saw. They also didn't like the idea that it was very difficult to replace for something they did like.
None of which are used in many companies.
I'm pushing my company to go to FreeBSD, but there are many who are completely powerless.
"Oh you don't like systemd, better not work on any Linux systems in any company" is the basic gist of what this means.
If it is as broken as you say why was it adopted?
The BSDs have really straightforward to maintain init scripts. Mainly because all the boilerplate junk is hidden in sourced-in files. Runit takes a more advanced approach, but its service files are still simple scripts a few lines long. We don't need a reinvent-the-world solution like systemd to address the most complained about problems with init.
In fact, only Debian underwent that process. Ubuntu did not. Nor did Fedora.
The Arch process was very different.
After all, Ubuntu is basically for Debain what RHEL is for Fedora.
You work in software right?
You never ever "just" replace a system with an improved feature-alike product, you go apeshit crazy with cool stuff you wanted for the past 5 years but couldn't get approved, until you run out of budget. Duh.
I specifically want Turing completeness out of my configuration languages.
That ship sailed a long ago when Linus ranted against microkernels :) Linux was never meant to follow a 'do one-thing well' design. It was designed to be a monolithic do-all-things design that's also highly modular.
Was Solaris a microkernel OS? How about SunOS? Irix? DEC OSF/1? HP/UX?
Last I checked, they weren't yet all were considered examples of Unix, and all existed before Linux.
I agree this is a big part of the problem, and appreciate it being raised.
> All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly brought upon themselves
I think Systemd comports itself as project exactly like most free software projects do, including Linux. Linus creates a template and then rages about how he doesn't like it.
The second major issue is it growing way out of the bounds of being just an init replacement, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing one-thing well. For a user app to do that is one thing, but for a core OS component to do that just smells way too much like forcing Linux to be more like Windows, which a lot of hard-core Linux users are ideologically opposed to.
The third major issue is that on most major Linux distros, users are not given an easy way to avoid using systemd, no matter how much they hate it or oppose it.
The fourth issue is the apparent arrogance of the people responsible for systemd, and their off-hand dismissal of mature and widely respected unix conventions.
All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly brought upon themselves. Had they just been more humble about their creation and waited until it was mature and well-tested and did all the wonderful things they claim it could and should do instead of stuffing what was widely seen as a broken-by-design piece of garbage down everybody's throat, maybe much of the Linux community wouldn't have been nearly so outraged by it.