Why the fuck does Arch ship with NTP installed but disabled by default? I know it's a DIY OS, but this is just plain inconvenient with no perceivable gain.

@molaram It's not a priority I get that, but this is not a tradeoff. I would settle for seeing a list of all the crap I might want to enable after Pacman installed something.

What if you wouldn't like that it contacts some server by default?

There's actually a conflict of principles here, like there always is when UI ends up shitty. The core principle of package managers is that you don't have to even be aware what's being installed, because all of that is automated away. On the other hand, one of the core principles of Arch is that nothing should happen without my express consent. Package management is against the principles of Arch, but the conflict can be resolved if the package manager only does what's strictly necessary to execute my order and then either asks me about additional functionality or tells me what following steps I might consider.

@electrineer Good point

Wtf ntpd is installed by default? Why? Systemd already contains a client.

@hjk101 I meant Systemd's ntp service

@lbfalvy than you know why it is installed and not enabled. Makes perfect sense to me.
Ubuntu did upstart once. Every freaking thing that was installed no matter if it was an optional dependency it started at boot. Slowest thing ever.

Even when you be explicitly install ntpd it should not run by default as a server. Might not be what you want and might even be a security risk. Systemd is a collection of things like say Gnome. You want to explicitly enable features not have it do random stuff by default.

Why is SystemD installed by default?

If Arch is only supposed to do things with my express consent, SystemD seems quite at odds with that.

@Root
Welcome to Gentoo - where you can choose between multiple init systems and SystemD isn't even the default.

@lbfalvy
Arch is a binary package distribution. And SystemD probably is just one package containing all the shit. So they probably need to compile it with the ntp service included, so that they don't need to have different packages for any combination of the vast amount of bloat, SystemD includes by default.
The best any binary distribution can do, is to just not start all the bloat by default.

So Arch is probably doing it right. You need a source-based distribution if you want to be able to omit parts of a package.

@Root same reason bash is installed by default. There are things required to boot and have a working system. Arch is not Linux from scratch.
Systemd solves initializing a system in an elegant way. That is stupid simple for package maintainers and fast boot too. See link below and I can attest to that. Have been an arch user since before systemd existed. Had to mess with a config file that has a single line with the boot order of the services you wanted to start at boot. Sounds simple but some things where hell to order correctly and took 5 boots to get it right. Especially in tandem with udev scripts.

You can still change the init system of you if you really want.
https://reddit.com/r/archlinux/...

@Oktokolo Gentoo has an awesome init system. I started out with a distro that almost put me off Linux (less control than Windows). Than went the other way with Gentoo. So Gentoo was my first distro and nothing but love for it.
The init system was leagues better than the rest. I was surprised when I faced the complexity and issues with sys-v init and (please stay dead) upstart in my career.

As awesome as Gentoo's system is systemd is better IMO, especially for non-server systems.