I get the criticism which essentially boils down to, it's turning what used to be a "bazaar" into a "cathedral". Instead of the init system, udev, dbus, logging, networking, dhcp, run levels, cron, login system, etc. being separate systems bound together with duct tape, they're now one coherent system layer called systemd. I personally really like that, but I get why others wouldn't.

I don't get the outrage here about this decision though. If you were relying on systemd's sysvinit script support, you were already using systemd. And systemd .service files are strictly better than sysvinit scripts if you're already running systemd.

To me that's the proper evolution. As knowledge of a problem matures, it makes sense to mash the best-practices together into a single monolith that's designed to work together with minimal bubble-gum. The Cambrian explosion of small tools makes sense early-on but the cognitive load of that approach is much higher, and some of us have crap to do.

Most people complaining about systemd wouldn't even notice if their whole OS was just a single binary.

This attitude does not help the Linux stack, because the one thing software vendors do not have time for is to test against 10+ init systems[1].

I don't need both Wayland and X11, I just need one of these that is reliable.

I also don't need both Flatpak and Snap, I just need only one that does not have crippling bugs.

I also do not want to care about what version of glibc is on the target machine, I just want to compile a blob that anyone using any distro can run.

Choice is good, however not when it comes to the base system, the base system needs to be there and it needs to be reliable and people should build good stuff on top of that, init systems are not exciting things to build.

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems

That's all perfectly fine and a perfectly understandable attitude.

The thing is, it's not really what Linux is about, or FOSS or plain old human nature.

Different people like different things. They want choice and the same choices don't work for everyone. If you have a whole group of Unix computer users all hacking away on what they like and they want, you get diversity and options.

So that means that there are lots of types of Linux with different choices and tools. That's a good thing. It's one of the things I like about Linux.

If you want the one best choice for everything, the democratically-arrived at moderate sensible path of compromise, then go try FreeBSD, which does that but also embraces modern commodity hardware. You still get a wide choice of desktops and things, but much less wide.

But the choices of FreeBSD didn't suit everyone, and as a result there are also OpenBSD and NetBSD and DragonflyBSD and a lot of divided effort that results in slow overall progress.

Me, I am old and grumpy and I want stuff that Just Works™. So, because I can afford it, my home desktop is an iMac, because by and large, macOS Just Works.

But I dislike Apple's modern keyboards, and pointing devices, and lack of ports, and a lot of other things about their laptops. So I use Linux laptops. And there, I do not find that systemd helps me... but the mainstream distros all use it so I just put up with it. And it keeps making my machines fail to boot randomly, and it's not getting any better.

I keep eyeing up distros without it and stroking my greying beard thoughtfully, though.

The moral here is that there isn't, and can't be, One Best Option that suits everyone. It's not possible because different people want different things.

> It couldn't really be any simpler.

It could. Ask ChatGPT4 for a bash script that writes the unit for you into the right place.

Colossal amounts of drudgery, all suddenly gone. The problem was never the opinions for how things were done, it was always the drudgery of reading documentation. Now, poof.

If we're going to use the "just use GPT" response, you could ask ChatGPT for a systemd unit.

Also, this completely ignores the fact that GPT4 will often make up functions or make incorrect assumptions about how a language feature works (and I've seen it make several mistakes wrt shell quoting and the like), making it unusable for writing production code when you don't know the domain yourself. If you now have to debug the script, the use case of LLMs is gone.

I really cannot believe how much worse HN comments have got over the past few years, from an already pretty annoying point.

just...wow.

I don’t know dude, did you try it? I’ve done exactly this, have it do the drudgery of writing the unit, I am a sophisticated developer. I am just trying to share a different POV, that the controversy over so many tools is really about how weird or wonky they are to use. But if the interface for them becomes simple and expressive, suddenly those complaints don’t matter. It goes from “just” and “simply” to just and simply, which is incredible. And if you still don’t know what I’m talking about, if you still feel like downvoting or saying what the other commenters say…

Listen, it’s $20 to find out if what I’m saying is true. Just try it.

I guess a (yet another) noticeable downturn happened at the Reddit exodus.

> Ask ChatGPT4 for a bash script that writes the unit for you into the right place. Colossal amounts of drudgery, all suddenly gone.

Given that humans can't write reliable bash scripts that don't randomly delete things in your computer [1], why would you expect something generated by LLMs to not randomly delete things on your computer or worse?

If you have to inspect and debug whatever the AI generated, that is potentially a lot worse that just writing it yourself in the first place.

[1] https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issue...

Some people don't want simple and comprehensible. They want to run unnecessarily complex scripts in black terminals with green fonts. Let them be, somebody has to operate all the remaining PHP web pages out there.

To be fair, after reading the thread about how people are voting with their feet about systemd-based distributions, I think there's a fair bit of trolling in this thread.

"Dropping systemd" would mean that they either use containers in an OS that most likely uses systemd itself, or they otherwise use some niche distribution (such as Antix, Devuan) that I've never heard of being used widely in a production context.

Other aspects of systemd might need getting some used to, but it's nothing that a reading of the Archlinux wiki didn't solve.

Voting with their feet? As a non-OS developer, I have a very limited distribution selection if I want to use a popular choice receiving more support , bug fixes, etc. Sure, I could run a less popular distribution that foregoes systemd, but what happens when I encounter an issue with wifi, sound, etc. Can I get CUDA or Steam to work on a periphery OS?

Systemd is chosen for me because there is so much more to an OS.

It is chosen for you democratically by people that actually bother fixing those problems for you, for mostly free. Debian has voted multiple times on it, with systemd winning hands down each time.

Maybe we should listen to their expertise, shouldn’t we?

I wish there was a command to just generate one of these files instead of always having to look it up, copy/paste, and then fill it all in.

It's the simple things that reduce friction that matter. Devs never understand this.