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Is Systemd that bad afterall?
(sopuli.xyz)
SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.
I'm old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don't see that as an issue anymore. I don't have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).
My 2 questions:
- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they've improved a lot)?
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
It's a massive question, and I think quite a lot of the argument comes from the fact that it depends what direction you're answering it from.
As a user, do I like being able to just
systemctl enable --now whatever.service, and have a nice overview of 'how's my computer' insystemctl status? Yes, that's a big step up from symlinking run levels and other nonsense, much easier.As an administrator, do I like having services, mounts and timers all managed in one way? Yes, that is very nice - can do more with less, and have to spend less time hunting for where things are configured. Do I think that the configuration files for these are a fucking mess of 'just keep adding new features in' and the override system is lunacy? Also yes.
As a developer trying to do post-mortem debugging, who just wants all the logs in front of him for some server that's gone wrong somehow, which I often have to request via an insane daisy-chain of emails and 'Salesforce nonsense that our tech support use' from our often fairly non-technical end users, on some server that I've no other access to? No, I do not find having logs spread between
/var/logand journalctl (and various CloudFormation logs in a web console) makes my life easier. I would be pleased if that got sorted out.tl:dr; mostly an improvement, some caveats.
As someone who recently started learning linux properly by setting up arch, systemd is nice. It does a lot of things that make life easier for me and it never gets in the way.
Edit: Please disregard, this should be a top level comment.
why did you ctrl c ctrl v your own comment?
Because it was intended to be a top level comment and I only noticed that I wasn't commenting on top level after posting it.
Did the deletion of this one not get through to your instance yet?
oh, lol, it's fine
probably
Alright, I thought I was quick enough but deletion seems to work differently in the federation. I restored the comment and added an edit, that should avoid confusion once everything is synced properly.
I didn't know that logging question is related to SystemD, so thanks for telling it! As an non-top class desktop user the same thing frustrates especially because the solution is often simpler and not found from those logs.
What do you see wrong with the config override system? I find it an improvement over having to diff between new and current config files, then having to figure out which part of which to keep.