What’s really wrong with systemd?

It's... Different.

And imo it's growing too much [too wide, too deep] into the system. Now systemd manages pretty much everything. Bootloader kickstarts an initialization kernel, it boots the main kernel, it starts systemd which manages the rest of the system.

The beauty of system modularity is getting dimmer with each systemd upgrade/subproject

It us really hard to debug, and setup correctly.

It breaks the startup scripts to "Unit"s And allows to depend on other "Unit"s being run. This has side effects that makes interdendency between the "Unit"s really hard to comprehend. There are tools that allow you to understand whats going on. And the docs are not the best at explaining this.

Also - nobody likes changes.

It generates binary logs.

It tries to solve too many problems at once.

It isn't that easy to replace it when it is so embedded in the distro.

Its commands can't even output text normally, which should the absolute basic functionality of every program.

it does things automatically i didn't tell it to do, for example setting the system time to some random date instead of leaving it at 1970-01-01.

I feel like all my startup and shutdown logs have this parasite, and it's hard to read.

What the others said.

Plus an easy example.

Take a look at systemd-resolved.

To support different DNS systems under a single distribution, systemd-resolved is an own DNS server which manages DNS resolution for the whole system based on own configuration and lookup via different name lookup systems.

You cannot avoid that in most systems nowadays... Until you start ripping out things like e.g. NetworkManager.

An own DNS server is... Delicate.

If you ever fucked with DNS caching, you should know that delicate means: If it goes wrong, you only realize it when it's too late.

I've had my fair deal of problems with that approach in the past, which is the reason why we ripped it out of most server distribution setups and instead went for OpenResolv.

Cause that doesn't involve an DNS server... Which is good for many more reasons than just caching problems.

SystemD started as an InitD solution, but now goes from boot to containerization to network to device management to DNS to recovery mechanisms to ....

It's fucking everywhere.

system dicks

Let me put it this way: systemd would be an alright software if it were an implementation of some abstraction. This way you could simply swap it out with an alternative if you did not like systemd-smth service. No fuss, no muss.

But the more I come across it, the more I come to see other 3rd party software relying on systemd: not as abstraction, but as an implementation. As a result, systemd becomes locked in by the soft depending on it and cannot be replaced.

Effectively, linux is turning into rigid unix, with less and less freedom and flexibility, because more and more software comes to depend on systemd.

I'd really love if LSF extracted an interface for systemd modules, like they did with OCI and docker. Docker became paid and thanks to oci we have good alternatives for it

@netikras can i survive in linux without systemd? Which distros can you recommend?