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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Is Systemd that bad afterall? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] taladar 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Lets be perfectly honest. The reason systemd is so popular is because the init script based predecessors were so bad in so many ways. Not only did you have to reimplement the same things over and over in every script, the behaviour of your script also depended on environment variables in your environment while you started a service and other things that leaked into the script.

Would an init system have to do as much as systemd does to fix those issues? No. Are the existing alternatives really, really bad? Yes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

No, you be honest. Have you ever tried any of the others? Granted sysvinit is painful to work with, but that's ancient. Have you tried any of the modern ones, like OpenRC? Sounds like you haven't. I can't imagine someone experiencing OpenRC and then arguing for systemd.

[–] taladar 1 points 2 years ago

I was on openrc on my Gentoo machines for years but most of the scripts I wrote myself were for RHEL and Debian servers. Openrc was just as bad as the other script-based systems.