Most of the popular distros only support systemd. Fedora, Debian (and Debian based distros), Arch, SUSE and can't run without it. So for a lot of people get the option of staying with their favorite distro not at all. It's like if most sandwich shop in your city only served sandwiches mayonnaise. - ThreadSky

kagejittai.bsky.social • 131 days ago

Most of the popular distros only support systemd. Fedora, Debian (and Debian based distros), Arch, SUSE and can't run without it.

So for a lot of people get the option of staying with their favorite distro not at all. It's like if most sandwich shop in your city only served sandwiches mayonnaise.

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seanofthedev.bsky.social•131 days ago

So the people who work at the level where systemd matters are the same people who can't work in a distro other than one that uses systemd (or build their own)? Isn't that like a trained chef complaining that Kraft uses powdered cheese?

(Appreciate your actual response and explanation, btw)

kagejittai.bsky.social•131 days ago

I think most desktop users will never know what systemd is or does. I actually do think systemd's approach is overall better for the average user. Because all the components are only designed to work with systemd you don't have to worry compatibility issues and have fewer edge cases.

kagejittai.bsky.social•131 days ago

But if you're building for an embedded system, mobile device, or a lightweight desktop. You're probably going to want to exclude systemd as it's monolithic design and feature set are over kill.

kagejittai.bsky.social•131 days ago

Now that most major distros only support systemd, other alternatives get less attention, bug fixes, features, etc. So in someways this is seen as a harm to the overall ecosystem.

kagejittai.bsky.social•131 days ago

There's also an edge case where systemd's binary logging system might make troubleshooting difficult. If systemd breaks somehow, you might not be able to use systemd's journald to read the logs, or logs might never be created in the first place.

This could be avoided if they switched to text logs.

seanofthedev.bsky.social•131 days ago

That all makes sense but it confirms my experience: systemd is a problem only for people fully capable of solving the problem.

Is anyone using systemd because they have no way to use anything else?

kagejittai.bsky.social•131 days ago

It uses a lot of design choices which make it incompatible with replacing components of it. So you can't pick and use parts of systemd and something else for the other parts.

This why it's adoption has been so universal, for certain things it does there aren't good alternatives.

kagejittai.bsky.social•131 days ago

Systemd developers could've chosen to make it's components more modular, or to use text log files since that makes system recovery easier. But they've mostly ignored these complaints.

At this point though, for better or worse, we've walked down this path and I don't think there's anyway out of it.

ldo17.bsky.social•118 days ago

systemd myth 1: systemd is monolithic.
systemd myth 20: systemd makes it impossible to run syslog.

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

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