UPDATE: after many comments, let me be clear that i have nothing against systemd at a technical level. It indeed solves issues that people had and found it’s way in most mainstream distros for good reasons, beside being pushed by Redhat and Debian, which makes for basically every other mainstream distro out there without much choice. I never used it long enough to judge it, and i dont intend to judge it from a technical point of view. I am worried that such a centra piece of technology deeply interwined with linux is under direct control of IBM and Microsoft (who is the employer of the systemd lead). This might mean nothing, or this could be important for the long time future of linux freedom.

I have recently been exposed to a lot of stuff against systemd.

I know its an old debate that has inflamed people for a long time, I am not looking into restarting it as I never took a stance into it in the past anyway.

I am myself a almost 30+ years power user of Linux and I have never used systemd much myself since it never fixed any issues I had with the previous approaches, and since I am a good user of Gentoo, always loved the freedom to just keep using OpenRC and din’t ever bother with systemd.

I like the Unix approach and at the same time, if it is not broken don’t fix it, is my basic idea. So my approach to systemd has been not of dislike, rather of I don’t care, I don’t need it. And I never needed it anyway.

After reading trough most of the links below I start to think that maybe my stance could be more than simple technical.

What are other lemmy-ers idea on all this?

I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the Linux Foundation either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

TLDR: I don’t dislike systemd, I never cared about systemd. Do I need to start caring now due to all this non technical issues?

Note: i a copying verbatim the following article to stress that these are not my personal opinions and that i didnt do a proper research on the topic, except reading (most) of the links below.

(The following is a post on the #libreware telegram channel on the 7th/8th of February 2025)

Lennart Poettering intends to replace “sudo” with #systemd’s run0. Here’s a quick PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploiting the fact “systemd-run” (the basis of uid0/run0, the sudo replacer) creates a user owned pty for communication with the new “root” process.

This isn’t the only bug of course, it’s not possible on Linux to read the environment of a root owned process but as systemd creates a service in the system slice, you can query D-BUS and learn sensitive information passed to the process env, such as API keys or other secrets.

https://fixupx.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559

Nitter mirror: https://xcancel.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559

Here are some links about #systemd #alternatives for #Linux in no particular order. Which are your favorite alternatives and distros?

https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/

https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html

https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/

https://nosystemd.org/

https://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html

https://the-world-after-systemd.ungleich.ch/

https://ewontfix.com/14/

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=120652

https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/

https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom

https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/linux-systemd-exploit.html

https://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/systemd-it-keeps-getting-worse/

https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/why.php

Some more added here too: https://start.me/p/Kg8keE/priv-sec

#systemd #Linux

  • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    16 days ago

    Systemd provides a modern user space which fixes a huge number of problems. At first I found it difficult to learn but it had things I needed and I made the effort. I will always be nostalgic about things before systemd because I started using linux in the mid 90s.

    I’m not going to throw away my GPU and multi-core CPU and go back to a 386 running dos because multithreaded applications and speculative execution scare me. There is no way to match what modern systems can do by taking old architectures and just adding more gates or faster clock speeds. And there are parallels in software architecture.

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with running a BSD or a non-systemd linux distro if you like. They are still perfectly usable in a lot of situations doing the same stuff people did for years in these systems. If you have a server with a static set of devices that runs a fixed set of services at startup you don’t really need systemd. I still have some systems like that but systemd also handles those cases more efficiently and robustly.

    You see these sort of link dumps from people who think vaccines cause autism or that some diet will cure cancer. Whatever the intention behind it I always associate it with a bad faith attempt to fuck with people’s heads by bamboozling them with more information than they can rationally analyze.

    Believe what you want but you might want to consider that all the experts working on systemd and using it productively might know their shit.

  • GravitySpoiled@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    I don’t understand what you are talking about.

    I like reading a post with a clear topic and reasoning, unfortunately it’s not obivous to me.

    Something like “I dislike systemd because XY. What do you think?” Would help me.

    • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euOPEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      I don’t dislike systemd, I never cared about systemd.

      Do I need to start caring now due to all those non technical issues?

      (Tldr added to top post)

  • Yozul@beehaw.org
    0·
    17 days ago

    Systemd is a good init system. Better than any of the alternatives, although they’ve also come a long way since systemd first came around. It’s also a weird interconnected mess of a thousand other things that probably shouldn’t all be lumped together into a single project. Half of them are absolutely vital to the vast majority of Linux systems, and half of them are unused and neglected and no one has touched them in years, but they’re all stuck together in one weird project for some reason.

    That’s kind of the exact same sort of situation xorg was in 20 years ago. I am concerned that systemd is going to turn into the next xorg, but really those concerns are the only reason most people should consider an alternative. If you don’t care about that, you probably don’t need to worry about systemd.

  • Valmond@lemmy.world
    0·
    17 days ago

    I don’t know what systemd does and now I’m too afraid to ask.jpg

    Also obligatory fuck microsoft, go crawl and Embrace other stuff.

  • kixik@lemmy.ml
    0·
    17 days ago

    Where did you get this idea?

    I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the fsf either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

    I think you are confusing FSF with the Linux Foundation, and you can see MS as part of the platinum LF members. Was that it, or you really meant FSF?

  • Quazatron@lemmy.world
    0·
    17 days ago

    A lot of man-hours went into engineering it. Very smart people from many distros went over it, kicked its tires and deemed it good enough to replace old SysV. We’ve been through this, if you don’t like it for some reason, use something else.

    It’s just software, people, it’s not a frelling religion.

    • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euOPEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      Did you read my post at all? Maybe I am not clear enough.

      I don’t care for systemd, I don’t dislike it I don’t like it. I don’t use it but merely because I never felt the need to use it, or I would have use it.

      What people think of the non technical reasons given in the links/post is what I am asking. Is it just FUD or there is a valid base to them?

      • Rogue@feddit.uk
        0·
        17 days ago

        You provided 15 links.

        Are you seriously expecting somebody to walk you through each one?

        You’re claiming not to care either way about systemd and yet you’ve provided 15 sources against it and apparently done zero research into why it has been so widely adopted.

      • non_burglar@lemmy.world
        0·
        16 days ago

        If you don’t care about systemd, then why post?

        Sysvinit is done. It is not graceful at handling dependant services, it was hard to test, and customising a service was painful compared to unit files.

        For someone who’s been at Linux for 30 years, you clearly haven’t spent any time fighting with init scripts.

        Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Poettering. His approach lacks any empathy for anyone who’s entrenched in a current system and breaks stuff with his deployment approach.

        But run0 solves a LOT of problems with sudo, problems that have always existed. Have you ever tried to deploy a sudoers file in an ecosystem of Linux systems relying on LDAP? Sudo definitely needs fixing.

  • Drito@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    15 days ago

    Redhat rewrites everything “not invented here” and put these things under “systemd” name. There are misundestanding between people that have political concerns, and people just happy to get unified shiny things. If one day Redhat provides a Systemd-OS I’m sure most people will be happy, and will shit on the previous system, with a separated kernel and the freedom of composing your own OS. Most people just wants an open-source Windows and I can understand that. But I also understand people that are ready to sacrifice some convenience to get a composable OS that can be maintained outside of big companies, thanks to simpler components

  • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    17 days ago

    Gentoo user here too. I once switched to systemd, but didn’t stay using it for too long. Back then some things didn’t work with systemd. Nowdays my systems use seatd instead of logind or elogind. Some have musl toolchain. It’s just simpler, currently, for me to use OpenRC on all of my setups. But the thing I most disliked with systemd was that it cannot work without journald.