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://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html
https://the-world-after-systemd.ungleich.ch/
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
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.
Thank you, at least somebody took care to actually respond to my question somehow!
I personally don’t really care much about the init system. For most of my linux journey i was using arch, then void, then nixos, and now i’m back on void, so i jumped between systemd and runit for a bit. I never chose to use void because of its init system though, i just prefer its package manager. I found both systemd and runit to be fairly simple to use and it just gets out of my way. Poettering working for microsoft has concerned me a little bit, but if i’m being honest that’s just me wearing the tin foil hat. I will say though that at this point, if something were to happen to void and i had to move back to arch, i might try using artix just for the style points, and because of me already being familiar with runit anyway.
Yes, that is one point. Having the main dev working for “the enemy”. Systemd being developed by the main dev who is at microsoft? To me that rings some bells.
He will keep doing a great job, he is paid for this, but the point is that microsoft could try to control linux a bit too much, and so is IBM…
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.
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
This is one of the most spot-on replies in this thread. Thanks! I think what you wrote is basically correct.
Only people who cares on how the basics is Linux stays compatible and fully free (as in freedom). But that’s fine, as far as systemd can be optional.
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.
We’ve been through this, if you don’t like it for some reason, use something else.
My god. Yes, we’ve been through this. You can’t just replace Systemd on most distros, because to have the alternatives in the repo, they would have to provide a bunch of shims and wrappers or have two different repos entirely. This is why i dislike Systemd, btw.
And before you start with Gentoo; yes, there it works, because it’s source based and Openrc is basically the wrapper.
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?
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.
Probably it’s too much asking to go trough all of them indeed, it’s lemmy afterall, already most of the comments didnt actually read the entire first post either.
But i think i didnt have to provide “pro-systemd” links as my intent is not to discuss it’s technical goodness (which i do not dispute!) but to understand what is the common idea about the fact that systemd could be a critical part of Linux which is in the hands of IBM and Microsoft and what this means for the linux community overall.
Either nobody cares, or it’s too much complottistic to be real.
understand what is the common idea about the fact that systemd could be a critical part of Linux which is in the hands of IBM and Microsoft and what this means for the linux community overall.
Either nobody cares, or it’s too much complottistic to be real.
I wasn’t familiar with the word complotism but yes I think this is the case - It’s just an unsubstantiated conspiracy.
Even if were true that Microsoft had taken over systemd by stealth. What is the harm? If they suddenly do something malicious with it then all the distros will just fork systemd and continue without the malicious elements.
That is true, it’s open source after all. But i am maybe too old to remember Microsoft strategies to embrace and extinguish… So i am a bit worried, like i was worried that Magisk would be crippled since the lead dev was hired by Google (and indeed, there have been very few progress on Magisk, with Kernel SU getting all the hype lately).
I really love all the 5+ years old articles about why systemd sucks.
It’s not perfect but it’s so much better than the plethora of different init methods Linux used to have. Also managing sysv init scripts sucked really bad.
It’s lightweight, most of it is optional, it’s declarative, it makes managing your systems much easier and it just works.This isn’t really an important point or anything, but I always find it odd when people bring up sysv init when talking about systemd. That’s kind of like arguing that people should switch to Linux because Windows Vista was bad. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it is a very weird thing to bring up in 2025.
