One of the big complaints of systemd detractors I read is that it’s “monolithic” and “taking over everything” and this “shouldn’t all be part of init”

You might want to point out that all the features outside of systemd-as-init are optional and can be replaced or ignored if you don’t want them. They also don’t run as PID 1

You do have to use systemd-journald, but you can also just forward it to syslog if you want

Do we have to bring this up again? It's just boring.

systemd is here and it isn't going anywhere soon. It's an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.

Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.

Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?

systemd brings much functionality. It can't follow unix philosophy because unix is 50 years old. the whole community drama about this systemd VS sysV VS OpenRC VS whatever comes up, is funny. There are distros that are systemd-free if you wish so much to avoid it.

Very interesting article with lots of links that I'm sure to revisit often. I use Linux daily and was not aware of all the possibilities that systemd has to offer.

Some of the cruft I use nowadays to manage Linux machines can be optimized by simply moving over to the systemd equivalent. Of particular interest to me are: triggers, timers, file monitoring, and ntp.

systemd-nspawn is basically chroot but better

systemd has made my life so much easier in so many ways. Other people prefer messing with bash files and there are definitely better alternatives for services like systemd-resolved, but basic service and timer management has improved massively.

I wish there was a good GUI for systemd, though. A lot of configuration options have moved to systemd files now, and for novices it's hard to find what file does what and how to configure them. Several Linux distros and desktop environments have their own tools that read from/write to systemd files, but they'll always lag behind the actual systemd resources.

I think an official systemd GUI to manage services and networks would make Linux a lot more usable for people with some computer knowledge but no time or interest in reading man pages. I'd imagine some kind of GUI like Windows has for system services (titled "advanced system settings" or whatever) that can do things like manage network adapters, alter DNS config, start/stop/enable/disable services, the whole deal.

ah soft reboot ive been waiting for something like that

systemd is great, but being disingenious isn't helping anyone:

chrony -> sd-timesyncd [...] one less daemon

just because it ships with systemd doesn't mean it magically runs without it's own process

And yes, Systemd does containers. :)

Are systemd duplicates such as containers and systemd-boot are better than the existing ?

Systemd together with NetworkManager are two pieces of software I really dislike. They go against the very Unix philosophy. I like being able to piece all the bricks together on my own, not having monolithic pieces of software that try to do everything.