I tend to agree with most of the points you're making but I do want to point out that "If you don't like it, don't use it" isn't helpful advice for system administrators who weren't given a choice in the matter. It's fine if you're designing a system from the ground up, but most of the time, most of us have to work with what we're given.

I think most of the resentment against systemd is that it felt like it was forced down our throats. Systemd may be an improvement over the mess of shell scripts we had before but it isn't perfect. It's one thing to choose to give up decades of experience so one can voluntarily switch to a new system. It feels very difference when the choice isn't one's own.

If you can't opt out of systemd-resolved due to job policies, that's really not systemd's fault and there's nothing they can do to solve that situation. Why complain about it in that context?

What does this have to do with job policies? Systemd was forced down our throats by Red Hat adding hard dependencies on it to other software under their control, e.g., GNOME. Other distros then adopted systemd under duress, since many of the packages that Red Hat made depend on it are important to the Linux ecosystem, and the other distros didn't have the resources to fork them all.

> Systemd was forced down our throats by Red Hat […]

That's a very emotional take on the whole thing. As I saw it, systemd happened and the Ubuntu developers eventually concluded "well, that's better than upstart, let's use that." Plenty of other distros made the same rational decisions. Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.

Also, GNOME is not under Red Hat's control. They contribute a lot, but the leadership rarely has a majority of Red Hat employees. While a large number of contributors work there (of course they would - Red Hat is big!), the majority are - again - from elsewhere. I can think of plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.

What your take is doing is discounting a very large number of peoples' wisdom, time, and effort, by claiming their contributions are made as helpless victims of some conspiracy or as evil supporters of it. Both of these ideas are harmful.

> Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.

> plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.

My claim is specifically that the people who added the hard dependency on systemd to GNOME were Red Hat employees. I'm not talking at all on who wrote or merged any other code in it.

Your claims went further than that and it feels very disengenuous for you to try and walk them back now.

When was I ever talking about changes to GNOME other than the systemd dependency? What am I walking back?

> Systemd was forced down our throats by Red Hat adding hard dependencies on it to other software under their control, e.g., GNOME. Other distros then adopted systemd under duress

What utter drivel. I've participated in the discussions around systemd in various distributions. There was a huge amount of discussion, then one by one distributions switched. Some quickly, some took various years. Again, some distributions took various years to switch.

That you can only say things such as "forced down our throats" and "duress" says enough. Not capable to actually hold a discussion, let's be emotional and without any actual facts.

> That you can only say things such as "forced down our throats" and "duress" says enough. Not capable to actually hold a discussion, let's be emotional and without any actual facts.

Does this sound any better? Red Hat used their influence over GNOME (and other programs) to add a hard dependency on systemd to it. This forced other distros to either switch to systemd or drop support for GNOME. I suspect that had Red Hat employees not added hard dependencies on systemd to any other software, that no distributions other than Fedora and RHEL and its clones would require it.

Nope, it's still entirely incorrect. Again, the release team misjudged things. I was part of the GNOME release team at that time. We were actually warned about it, then misjudged it ("it'll be fine").

Further, it wasn't even a hard dependency. You're really not understanding components and APIs.

> This forced other distros to either switch to systemd or drop support for GNOME.

No, again entirely incorrect. GNOME runs without systemd. A few distributions worked on ensuring GNOME runs without it. It took a while to make that happen, so for a bit some distributions needed to keep some components back. But still: you're talking about systemd while it was an interaction of a few components. Systemd consists of loads of bits.

GNOME _runs_ on distributions without systemd! It took work to make that happen, we coordinated to ensure the problems would be solved.

> I suspect that had Red Hat employees not added hard dependencies on systemd to any other software, that no distributions other than Fedora and RHEL and its clones would require it.

Again, you're so incorrect it's not funny. Arch was really quick to switch to systemd. I help out with Mageia, they really wanted to switch as well, but it took (volunteer) time to make it happen. Opensuse took a while, but still, they would've switched.

The only unique ones were Ubuntu (political crap) and Debian (partly due to political influence by Ubuntu).

Systemd was selected on merit by loads of distributions, not this conspiracy thing you're pretending it to be.

Not GP.

The fact that it took _work_ to get GNOME to run without systemd is a bad thing in my book.

Also, to claim that systemd was selected on merit without anything backing up the claim of "merit" is disingenuous; plenty of worse solutions end up winning all the time.

It took work because systemd (more precisely logind) solved real problems and so the work had to be done again for the sake of non-systemd distros.

Can you tell me what problems logind solved? Because on my own machine, I don't have it, and I don't need it. In fact, it's a struggle to make sure it's not pulled in as a dependency of anything.

The point is that the replacements being talked about, systemd-resolved for dns, systemd-timesyncd for ntp, and systemd-networkd for whatever else you would prefer to use for network config, are not a mandatory part of systemd. You can use systemd without using these other components and it will work perfectly well with whatever other services you want to use for dns, ntp, and ip networking. These other services are not dependencies of GNOME, either.

People are conflating systemd itself with all the optional services it comes bundled with. I don't even believe resolved and networkd are enabled by default, at least not by the vendor. Whether a distro enables it depends on the distro.

You have to be an expert on systemd to figure out how not to use systemd.

This would be a comment with two parts. First one will be counterarguments, second will be a generalized response. Please bear.

Part One:

---------

> systemd-resolved is not enabled by default in Debian and many distributions, and it is not needed in any way by systemd. If you don't like it, don't use it!

It's not possible to ask systemd about which parts are enabled and up to which extent. It always adds a discovery phase before starting to make changes in a system. If you don't do this discovery, you're probably in a wrestling party with systemd. If you do this discovery, it costs you time. Systemd SHALL provide a way to see how much of its enabled up to what extent.

Network Manager got this right. If there's a distribution native configuration file for an interface, Network Manager ducks out and leaves system to its own. If systemd finds an equivalent service running both in its own ecosystem and from another package, it either overrides it or collides head-on with it, so either systemd equivalent works, or nothing works as expected. Neat(!).

> Before systemd, at least on Debian, for a few years the recommended way was NOT calling `/etc/init.d/something`, but instead `service apache restart`.

That'd be RedHat family of distributions. Debian doesn't have service command out of the box. Using both for over a decade, RH uses service, Debian uses /etc/init.d

> Thanks to systemd, most linux installs now use `systemctl restart service1 service2`. Note that you can now act on multiple services at the same time. You can use this feature as a mnemonic

There was a thousand ways to do that before systemd, systemd added yet another way. It's not bad, but it was not novel in any way.

> In many cases, init.d scripts told you nothing when they failed. Each service has its own procedure. Nowdays you can always see what happened with the command systemctl prints on failure.

systemd reports the failure in the lines of "service failed to start. go look to the logs. I also probably intercepted them, so journalctl may work".

Any good init script reports the error as "I cannot find my run file and/or process, please go get the logs. Something is probably borked". It's more/less the same thing. Better reporting in systemd requires systemd targeted service files, which are not mandatory, or most practical all the time.

Part 2:

-------

Whenever something comes up about systemd, this summarized conversation comes to life:

    U1: We were happy before systemd. It broke too many things, it also tried to hijack everything. Now everything is different.
    U2: *defend systemd in various and countless ways*
    U3/U1: You're wrong.
    *A flame war ensues for some time*

This is neither productive, nor beneficiary to anyone. I'm using this thing called linux for more that 15 years. It's nearing 20. I've used init.d, mudur, upstart, systemd, etc. They all have advantages and disadvantages

However, neither of these systems have this fierce defendant army of systemd. To be brutally honest, systemd has a lot of advantages, makes many things more practical, and faster in many ways.

OTOH, systemd is not radically fast. It's faster, but not blindingly. It's practical, but not always. It's hijacking of services makes some stuff very backwards. Replacement of NTP and resolved makes things hard to manage. Default binary logs makes some admins and external systems go blind.

I'm not against progress or systemd in general, but please be a little more accommodating for neutral and negative comments about systemd. Not all the commenters are bone headed caveman who love their flint stones and reject lighters with all their life!

>It's not possible to ask systemd about which parts are enabled and up to which extent. It always adds a discovery phase before starting to make changes in a system. If you don't do this discovery, you're probably in a wrestling party with systemd. If you do this discovery, it costs you time. Systemd SHALL provide a way to see how much of its enabled up to what extent.

It absolutely is possible to do this. It's the same as finding out if any service is enabled or not. Every view of a service includes it's state and whether or not it is enabled. So if you want to check an individual service, look at systemctl status $service, and if you want to look at all services: systemctl list-unit-files

And if you want to look at only the enabled ones, you do the Unix thing and "| grep enabled"

I don't see why systemd needs to hardcode a command for this.

Just want to add, when you systemd list-unit-files | grep enabled, you do need to know the first field is the actual state and the second field is the vendor default state.

But this comment is totally right. If you're a Linux sysadmin, how hard is it seriously to type into a search engine "systemd list enabled services." Exactly this command very helpfully comes up in DuckDuckGo's knowledge graph bubble so you don't even need to follow the link to askubuntu. I'm sure Google search does the same.

>There was a thousand ways to do that before systemd, systemd added yet another way. It's not bad, but it was not novel in any way.

The difference here is that systemd actually went to the individual distro maintainers and listened to their concerns, made the necessary changes, and convinced them all to adopt it. That's damn hard to do in the Linux world, I commend anyone who can do it successfully.

Regarding your part 2: For whatever reason, there is an absurd amount of misinformation posted whenever systemd comes up. If you posted something that was wrong about some other service manager, I would correct that too. You deserve to know the right answer to things, for your sake, not for the sake of systemd (or any other program). Please don't dismiss attempts to correct misinformation as being unproductive, it's the flame war which is the unproductive part.