systemdeez nuts

Someone please convince me why I should hate systemd because I still don't understand why all the hate exists.

The idea as far as I can tell is that it's responsible for too many things and gives a massive point of failure.
- Man, wait until these people hear about the filesystem and kernel.
- It's also "infectious" software. The way systemd positions itself on the system, it can make it more difficult for software to be written in an agnostic way. This isn't all software, and is often more of a complaint by lower level software, like desktop environments.
  https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/ This isn't a terrible summary of some of the aspects of it.
  Another aspect is that when it was first developed, the lead on the project was exceptionally hostile to anyone who didn't immediately agree that systemd definitely should take over most of the system, often criticizing people who pointed out bugs or questionable design decisions as being afraid of change or relics of the past.
  It's more of a social reason, but if people feel like the developer of a tool they're forced to use doesn't even respect their concerns, they're going to start rejecting the tool.
- Indeed, the Unix philosophy was do one thing and do it well. ls just list directory’s and files it’s not a network manager too. Systemd crams a lot of extra shit into an init.d/rc.
  I still prefer the old system-v/openRC setup or BSD’s setup. It’s simple does 1 job and does it well. But I can work with systemd just fine in creating scripts these days and it does have some nice features like user startup scripts baked into it and podman integrates very nicely with it.
My understanding is that some people are die hards to the software philosophy of "do one thing really well". systemd at the very least does many different things. These people would prefer to chain a bunch of smaller programs together to replicate the same functionality of systemd since every program in the chain fits the philosophy of "does one thing really well".
- For me it’s 3 things
  Do one thing and do it well
  Everything is a file in Linux
  human readable logs
  Systemd breaks all three of though by being monolithic and binary. It actually makes you have to jump through more hoops to do things in certain cases. I understand it’s a mindset shift but it really starts making it feel more like Windows with how it works and the registry and event log.
It's different from what the init system was like in the 80's.
People don’t like it because it’s declarative. It felt cool to be able to just put bash files into certain directories to have them executed on startup. That was elegant, in the sense of “everything’s a file”.
systemd is more of an api than a framework, so it’s a different design paradigm.
I hated systemd until I printed out the docs, for some coffee, and sat in a comfy chair to read them front to back. Then I loved it.
Mostly I hated it because I didn’t know how to do things with it.
Also, “journalctl” is kind of an ugly command. But really, who gives a fuck. It’s a well-designed system.
And if a person absolutely must execute their own arbitrary code they can just declare a command to execute their script file as the startup operation on a unit.
- Your comment summarizes my entire programming career.
  These steps:
  Be taught that there's a specific way to do something because the other ways have major issues
  Find something that goes against that specific way and hate it
  After a lot of familiarity, end up understanding it
  Have a mix emotion of both loving it because it functions so well and hating it because it doesn't align with the rules you've set up
- Good that you've enjoyed it. But a fundamentally wrong thing about systemd is that it is actively harming the best thing about Linux – freedom. Some programs won't work on a non-systemd distro because how tightly coupled and vendor non-agnostic anything that becomes dependent on might become at times. Of course it's not as bad as glib(loat)c, but still if something can be done without any degradation of functionality via standard POSIX facilities, WHY either incur additional maintenance overhead for non-systemd implementations or punish people for their computing choices if there's no one to maintain it?
"we would never use such a sucky piece of bloatware near anywhere we cared about security."
systemd tries to unify a Wild West situation where everyone, their crazy uncle, and their shotgun-dual-wielding Grandma has a different set of boot-time scripts. Instead of custom 200-line shell scripts now you have a standard simple syntax that takes 5 minutes to learn.
Downside is now certain complicated stuff that was 1 line need multiple files worth of workarounds to work. Additionally, any custom scripts need to be rewritten as a systemd service (assuming you don't use the compat mode).
People are angry that it's not the same as before and they need to rewrite any custom tweaks they have. It's like learning to drive manual for years, wonder why the heck there is a need for auto, then realizing everybody is only producing manual cars.
I remember the clusterfuck that existed before systemd, so I love systemd.

I mean you essentially just highlighted a primary user experience problem with Linux....
Information & advice is fragmented, spread around, highly opinionated, poorly digestible, out of date, and often dangerous.
And then the other part of it is that a large part the Linux community will shit on you for not knowing what you don't know because of some weird cultural elitism...
When you finally ask for help once you realize you don't know what you're doing, you're usually met with derisive comments and criticism instead of help.
Do you want Linux to be customizable so that users can control it however they want. Or do you want it to be safe so that users don't mess it up? You can't have it both ways, and when you tell users to "go figure it out" and then :suprise_pikachu: that they found the wrong information because they have literally no idea what's good or bad, instead of helping, they get shit on.
It's the biggest thing holding Linux desktop back.
- I feel this in my soul, except about Windows. I've got a handful of machines at work that refuse to update to Windows 10 22H2. They give an error code during the compatibility check. Googling that error code returns dozens of forum posts with hundreds of users and "Microsoft support agents" chiming in. They give the same list of suggestions—that don't work—to fix it. Nobody can say what the error code means, or what the compatibility check checks. The official Microsoft fix is to reinstall.
  I don't want to reinstall. The suite of software these computers run would take several hours to reinstall.
  This is typical of my experience with Windows. (I'm a Unix/Linux guy.) I look up how to do something in Windows, and with the official Microsoft documentation, one of three things inevitably happens:
  I follow the steps and click the things, and it still doesn't work.
  I can't follow the steps because one of the things to click is greyed out for some reason.
  I can't follow the steps because the documentation refers to an older edition, and Microsoft has removed one of the things to click.
  One time, when trying to get Excel to run a mail merge, I ran into all three problems in three attempts.
  The same happens with 3rd party sites. They never say the edition of Windows to which their guide refers, and the feature is deprecated or gone. (Most recently it was about getting a Windows 10 start menu behavior back on 11.)
  Oh, and since Windows is mainstream, a lot of the information is in the form of AI vomit, and covered in ads and dark patterns.
- The cultural elitism comes from years of tinkering with their system since all the information they can find is fragmented and spread around, highly opinionated,’poorly digestible, out of date, and often dangerous.
- This isn't a Linux problem this is a society problem people just want to one up everyone In anyway they can and sometimes I dont think we do it consciencely
- To be fair, Windows and Macos support is like this too. Its random forum suggestions from even less technical people.
  The distros official resources are comprehensive and don't have the issue of being outdated and fragmented.
- that they found the wrong information because they have literally no idea what's good or bad, instead of helping, they get shit on.
  I don't think anyone's seriously shitting on nooby mistakes, because everyone has done something stupid like that and learned a lesson from it. It's kind of a "cute noob" moment
Linus tech tips, is that you?
- He is less technically inclined
  He read a prompt asking if he wanted to remove his system and said yes
  Then complained about it

They forgot that heart transplant requires replacing the removed heart with another one and then connecting the blood vessels before closing up.
You can't just take it out and say "I'll put in another one after dinner"
Smartest systemd hater.

Best way to fix that is to go back in time and not do that

Lol this reminds me of a time when I had KDE desktop environment installed on vanilla ubuntu. I thought I didn't really need ubuntu's default desktop environment and decided to 'purge' it. I quickly realized my f up when it deleted so many packages and ui started to act weird, I copied the shell's output to a file just incase, and sure enough I couldn't login with ui on next reboot. I was somehow able to login to shell and with some awk magic I was able to parse the text file to get all the packages I deleted and lo and behold everything worked just fine. Linux let's you f'up your OS but it also let's you fix it, it's just a skill issue.

Linux lets* you
also lets* you fix it

All these files are backed up in /System32 folder

rm -yrf ~/*

(Just in case, don't do that)

How the fuck is login and "the command line" still working? Maybe they did not reboot.

The reboot probably sent him straight to a virtual console.

I updated my sources.list to something non-existing at some point and run sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove once and it also basically uninstalled everything. But that didn't even matter, I popped in a recovery disk and could reinstall everything. Pretty great to be able to do all that with Linux, fuck everything up in an instant but after a few hours everything is back again

I removed and sold the wheels of my car, now it does not move.

Just install Devuan.

Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd that allows users to reclaim control over their system by avoiding unnecessary entanglements and ensuring Init Freedom.
Gotta love this linux rhetoric, man! It's so out there.

I think I would have preferred sudo apt-get remove --purge systemd Yeah, some old habits never die.

Install devuan

How to turn debian to devian step by step guide
Just remove system d See easy

I removed the transmission from my car but now it won’t drive

That's what you get for transphobia my dude

Holly shit this has 700 upvotes

Stupidity is entertaining.

I just shot my OS in the heart, why isn't it working?

You can switch seamlessly between systemd and openrc on gentoo. Although it might be worth using one of the debian derivatives in this user's case - not sure they should be messing with their system too much!

He uninstalled systemd, now his computer is not doing systemd things anymore by his retelling. Seems like it worked fine. Yet he asks for a solution of a problem. Maybe he needs to state the problem.

This is like the Linux equivalent of deleting system32
- Nah, more like deleting explorer.exe.
  There's isn't really a Windows equivalent for this, as Windows doesn't give you control on this level.
  It'd be as if you could delete services.msc but also the runner behind it.

Systemd is bloat

Operating systems are bloat.
- Just give me a magnet, a needle and an hd platter