This should be renamed to "Branding about..."...Because that seems to be the focus on this destination webpage...and not content specific to the underlying tech of systemd.
Where "basic" follows a highly nuanced alternate definition, where if you step out of line without realising it, you lose 3 days debugging a complex undocumented interaction between 4 enterprise crapware daemons only to find out the answer is "you're wrong and won't fix" buried in a 6 year old bug report, when all you did was plug in a USB mouse or try to set the default audio output device, or something else.
Total and utter propaganda, it's underdeveloped steaming garbage
The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management - mostly because in the days of olde, everyone cobbled together their shell script Jenga towers in seclusion.
If they don't have the problems that other people are having...maybe they don't need that complexity. Different use cases can use different solutions.
An Army unit crossing rocky and muddy terrain might want tracked vehicles and tanks. I don't need that in a vehicle I drive 10 minutes to the office in the city.
This. I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it when my team was riding herd on a DC full of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes. But for basically everything else that I use Linux for, every time someone says "systemd does this", at least 50% of the time I don't need that, and most of the rest I could do with with other tools with vastly less complexity.
Not "this". By that logic most people do not need backups too. Rebuilding working service state after config change is non-trivial, requires using admin-only kernel interfaces, and said kernel does not care about these types of problems. Meaning average user ends up simply rebooting rather than trying to figure why enabling wifi makes printer stop working (and such). We cannot have network stuff controlled by multiple programs, because linux kernel is broken like that. This thing is the userspace part of the monolith.
Those jenga towers were terrible, many didn't work very well. Very few had good monitoring, ops, reliability, least-privleges.
It's unbelievable to me to hear people advocating for not having good broadly usable systems, to advocate that sysadmins really should spent their time and energy building bespoke custom cut weird poorly invested in little things to suit their own fancies. It's not helping the company to do this. And to me it's such a weird antisocial vibe, that is radically vocal, that shows up all the time to proclaim everyone everyone else is doing the wrong thing by working together and making tools that fit together, have cohesion. Theres never any suggestions for how or what that looks like either, just the image of not working with others is the only thing presented to sell itself. This is din. This is havoc. This is hell. Don't do it people. And alas, we have to endure this attitude every single time. The forces against cooperation are doggedly persistent and vocal. The forces for just build your own thing, this unreasonableness, is radically overrepresented.
This is why I was so hopeful this submission was going to be a nice new post kind of re-selling where we are today with systemd. Because the pro-social forces are weirdly not bothering to get the social / cultural victory. And those driving us apart telling us to each do our own thing, figure it all out yourself: they are endemic, dime a dozen on social media.
Analogies only go so far. Driving an actual tank with a cannon to the grocery store 10 minutes away is ludicrous, but my smartphone has gigabytes of both ram and storage and a CPU that runs at gigahertz frequency, but weighs about the same as a dumb phone that does far less. It's not the 1970's anymore. We can be inefficient and stop counting every single little bit where it doesn't count. Yes, where it counts, we still want to be efficient and mean and lean, like in transcoding, but for starting up services on a laptop with gobs of ram and CPU cycles to spare, the added expense of the tracked vehicle to the grocery store is what, an extra 100 milliseconds of loading data from nvme storage to RAM? Yeah, don't port kubernetes to a microcontroller. Focus on the interface you have with it and let the complexity just sit there, being harmless.
Actually I didn't say anything about overcomplexity and I wasn't thinking about systemd as an init system at all. That wild misinterpretation, which you knew to (partially) hedge with that "usually", is more or less the proof in the pudding frankly.
You know it's underdeveloped because everything is described as "basic" or "simple". There's no such thing in any complex design, yet somehow for all his purported seniority, he keeps pumping out designs using the same description.
But that’s precisely what it allows you to do: plug a socket unit into a service unit, connect a timer unit, then another service as a dependency… and that’s just for the init management. Systemd might not fit your personal stylistic preferences, but most of all it’s consistent.
This is just the homepage. Bah. I was hopeful this might be more! I would genuinely love for some posting on systemd that can actually talk to this.
There's posts on using systemd for this or that, which are fine, but it feels like the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally, to express ths vision, where-as the anti-vision (as ever) sells itself, is a magnet that makes common party out of all dissent.
> pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally
I'm not aware of this sort of parading in open source software. Do you have a past example? I see it as competent people using things that they want to use, with the "better" being preferred, for whatever reasons (including momentum). "Advocating" for an init system seems like something that should be entirely and completely by merit, with maintainability, debugability, and fragility probably being the top metrics for most systems, speed being important for anything with a human sitting in front of it.
Having everyone have to discover the pro/con's of every system themselves, in the dark, with no social media / blogging around it, seems like a very strange position to me.
Technology should be highly social. Especially open source! It in unique-for-technology ways gives us something real to be social over. We can share and unfold and unpack.
This isn't entirely what you are talking about but Architectures of Open Source is still one of the best "what is this" explorations of the tech world out there. I think good advocacy has a lot of these elements (if not so total) in it. In ways that can show the bigger pictures, which AOSA at it's best does! https://aosabook.org/en/
Given that the overwhelming majority of Linux distros have moved to systemd, it's not clear why the pro-systemd camp would need to be finding or making opportunities to rally.
They're spending their time build and improving systemd's set of building blocks.
The drift, the gap between the advanced guard of seasoned enjoyers and the rest of the world that doesn't know what their missing feels like material that deserves coverage to me?
Just stay heads down and keep doing the world, don't share, dont socialize has been the plan so far in a lot of open source. And I think the outcomes would be better if we tried methodologies other than this. Freaking weird that this is just accepted.
Every now and then there's a blog post or presentation that combines several systemd features to show how the result is a better overall system. The All Systems Go conference https://all-systems-go.io/ is a good place to learn about systemd.
Is your Civilization victory a Science, Military or Cultural one? I think that depends on how and if the technology is socialized and spoken of.
If people feel like it's an oppressor, something they don't understand that has rolled in, and now defacto is (is shipped in every distribution of note): it feels like a Military victory. Over them. It sparks no joy.
Appealing to the nerds can be a strong science victory. Preach all your amazingness. I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. There's little science-y reasons.
But there lurk Two Cultures problems everywhere. And figuring out how to bridge the technical to the world, how to sing praises, how to get the world to be interested in relating to, engaging in, giving it the ability to share in some of your wonder and awe: that is what turns Science Victory into a Cultural Victory. And it's what good worthy interesting projects deserve. And it should be an act we do, and help build. We should make appeals to the world, try to get them interested in relating to the upsides, and the downsides to, to give them something worth engaging. I feel like the negative creeps have absolutely slammed their way to Two Cultures wins, to appealing to the world with negativity, and I think some more deliberate, caring, thoughtful work and blogging would make a huge difference in building cultural momentum, in sealing in what ought be a Cultural Victory. That those who know systemd reasonably well largley agree with already, but that many people do not see or understand.
Sure. These sites are fine rallying points, absolutely.
But they are also very old, and there's very few efforts I've seen to pitch and promote systemd. It's found and enjoyed by a lot of people (particularly those who had to deal with the tangled haphazard sprawl of cobbled together systems from the before times), it makes nicely visible what is happening on the system, integrates cgroups and good least capabilities practices.
But it feels to me like there ought be more ongoing and vocal celebration of this, enjoyment of this. More rallying points that trumpet the wins, that page people in to how nicely this helps. I want to see more positive tech advocacy, is what I'm saying. This is a fine site, yes, with lots of discussion. I've enjoyed decades of Lennart blog posts too. But I wish there was more. I wish this submission was a blog post of the same title. A fresh take, a fresh spin, on such a worthy-of-treatment topic.
Yeah, and these LEGO blocks are strewn around the room by a 3-year-old just waiting for you to step on them. It's the worst thing, there is no organization in systemd. No rhyme or reason to it.
The basic core service supervision in systemd is great. And nearly everything else around it is bad as a result: command-line utilities, filesystem mount handling, virtualization integration, network configuration, etc.
Just look at systemctl's `--help` if you don't believe me. Why does it have `service-log-level` to set the log level for the target, but not a way to actually _view_ the logs? Or why does it have a top-level `--firmware-setup` flag?
You might have done barely working duck-taped Bash scripts; not eveyone who calls themself a 'system admin' is competent. But actual professionals who ran these systems since the 1970s had carefully written, fully functional scripts and we were quite capable of keeping hundreds and thousands of servers running just fine. Being bad at your job isn't the tools fault.
All Bash scripts are duck-taped by definition. It's a shitty duck-tape language.
> thousands of servers running just fine
Err yeah well you might have noticed these things called "laptops" and "desktops". SysVinit was... fine.. on servers. It worked badly on desktops and not really at all on laptops. I'm pretty sure the post introducing SystemD explained it all in detail if you want to learn something.
This should be renamed to "Branding about..."...Because that seems to be the focus on this destination webpage...and not content specific to the underlying tech of systemd.
Yes a more accurate headline - systemd would like to be perceived as a suite of basic building blocks
I can recommend the book "Savaged by Systemd"
It's on AA
> It’s on AA
Administrators Anonymous?
Is that where the alt.sysadmin.recovery crowd go now?
https://annas-archive.gd/
I keep meaning to leave a copy of this around the office somewhere however i suspect it would trigger HR
Where "basic" follows a highly nuanced alternate definition, where if you step out of line without realising it, you lose 3 days debugging a complex undocumented interaction between 4 enterprise crapware daemons only to find out the answer is "you're wrong and won't fix" buried in a 6 year old bug report, when all you did was plug in a USB mouse or try to set the default audio output device, or something else.
Total and utter propaganda, it's underdeveloped steaming garbage
I think the problem is that it's overdeveloped rather than underdeveloped.
The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management - mostly because in the days of olde, everyone cobbled together their shell script Jenga towers in seclusion.
If they don't have the problems that other people are having...maybe they don't need that complexity. Different use cases can use different solutions.
An Army unit crossing rocky and muddy terrain might want tracked vehicles and tanks. I don't need that in a vehicle I drive 10 minutes to the office in the city.
This. I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it when my team was riding herd on a DC full of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes. But for basically everything else that I use Linux for, every time someone says "systemd does this", at least 50% of the time I don't need that, and most of the rest I could do with with other tools with vastly less complexity.
Not "this". By that logic most people do not need backups too. Rebuilding working service state after config change is non-trivial, requires using admin-only kernel interfaces, and said kernel does not care about these types of problems. Meaning average user ends up simply rebooting rather than trying to figure why enabling wifi makes printer stop working (and such). We cannot have network stuff controlled by multiple programs, because linux kernel is broken like that. This thing is the userspace part of the monolith.
Those jenga towers were terrible, many didn't work very well. Very few had good monitoring, ops, reliability, least-privleges.
It's unbelievable to me to hear people advocating for not having good broadly usable systems, to advocate that sysadmins really should spent their time and energy building bespoke custom cut weird poorly invested in little things to suit their own fancies. It's not helping the company to do this. And to me it's such a weird antisocial vibe, that is radically vocal, that shows up all the time to proclaim everyone everyone else is doing the wrong thing by working together and making tools that fit together, have cohesion. Theres never any suggestions for how or what that looks like either, just the image of not working with others is the only thing presented to sell itself. This is din. This is havoc. This is hell. Don't do it people. And alas, we have to endure this attitude every single time. The forces against cooperation are doggedly persistent and vocal. The forces for just build your own thing, this unreasonableness, is radically overrepresented.
This is why I was so hopeful this submission was going to be a nice new post kind of re-selling where we are today with systemd. Because the pro-social forces are weirdly not bothering to get the social / cultural victory. And those driving us apart telling us to each do our own thing, figure it all out yourself: they are endemic, dime a dozen on social media.
Analogies only go so far. Driving an actual tank with a cannon to the grocery store 10 minutes away is ludicrous, but my smartphone has gigabytes of both ram and storage and a CPU that runs at gigahertz frequency, but weighs about the same as a dumb phone that does far less. It's not the 1970's anymore. We can be inefficient and stop counting every single little bit where it doesn't count. Yes, where it counts, we still want to be efficient and mean and lean, like in transcoding, but for starting up services on a laptop with gobs of ram and CPU cycles to spare, the added expense of the tracked vehicle to the grocery store is what, an extra 100 milliseconds of loading data from nvme storage to RAM? Yeah, don't port kubernetes to a microcontroller. Focus on the interface you have with it and let the complexity just sit there, being harmless.
> Driving an actual tank with a cannon to the grocery store 10 minutes away is ludicrous
And here's me thinking it would be a lot of fun...
I think it’d really help on the highway with traffic.
I don’t need it all the time, but that doesn’t stop it from being useful.
Actually I didn't say anything about overcomplexity and I wasn't thinking about systemd as an init system at all. That wild misinterpretation, which you knew to (partially) hedge with that "usually", is more or less the proof in the pudding frankly.
You know it's underdeveloped because everything is described as "basic" or "simple". There's no such thing in any complex design, yet somehow for all his purported seniority, he keeps pumping out designs using the same description.
"Building blocks" makes it sound like things you can use to build other things. In reality it's more of an octopus, or a fungus.
But that’s precisely what it allows you to do: plug a socket unit into a service unit, connect a timer unit, then another service as a dependency… and that’s just for the init management. Systemd might not fit your personal stylistic preferences, but most of all it’s consistent.
Yeah, like what Upstart did! Why did we switch away from that, again?
Didn't have timers for one, or the same level of support around sockets.
This is just the homepage. Bah. I was hopeful this might be more! I would genuinely love for some posting on systemd that can actually talk to this.
There's posts on using systemd for this or that, which are fine, but it feels like the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally, to express ths vision, where-as the anti-vision (as ever) sells itself, is a magnet that makes common party out of all dissent.
> pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally
I'm not aware of this sort of parading in open source software. Do you have a past example? I see it as competent people using things that they want to use, with the "better" being preferred, for whatever reasons (including momentum). "Advocating" for an init system seems like something that should be entirely and completely by merit, with maintainability, debugability, and fragility probably being the top metrics for most systems, speed being important for anything with a human sitting in front of it.
Having everyone have to discover the pro/con's of every system themselves, in the dark, with no social media / blogging around it, seems like a very strange position to me.
Technology should be highly social. Especially open source! It in unique-for-technology ways gives us something real to be social over. We can share and unfold and unpack.
This isn't entirely what you are talking about but Architectures of Open Source is still one of the best "what is this" explorations of the tech world out there. I think good advocacy has a lot of these elements (if not so total) in it. In ways that can show the bigger pictures, which AOSA at it's best does! https://aosabook.org/en/
Given that the overwhelming majority of Linux distros have moved to systemd, it's not clear why the pro-systemd camp would need to be finding or making opportunities to rally.
They're spending their time build and improving systemd's set of building blocks.
The drift, the gap between the advanced guard of seasoned enjoyers and the rest of the world that doesn't know what their missing feels like material that deserves coverage to me?
Just stay heads down and keep doing the world, don't share, dont socialize has been the plan so far in a lot of open source. And I think the outcomes would be better if we tried methodologies other than this. Freaking weird that this is just accepted.
> the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally
Why would they? Their leader was always "I know better than you, now f off". This kind of approach doesn't need any rallying or evangelism at all.
Every now and then there's a blog post or presentation that combines several systemd features to show how the result is a better overall system. The All Systems Go conference https://all-systems-go.io/ is a good place to learn about systemd.
- https://systemd.io/ is full of documentation.-
And it's crap. It still lists blog posts from 2012.
There is NO good overall diagram of all the moving pieces in systemd.
@jauntywundrkind I was about reply...but then @McGlockenshire said it best! Cut off the subdomain, and you'll get more info. ;-)
Do they need to? As an outsider, my view is that they already "won".
Is your Civilization victory a Science, Military or Cultural one? I think that depends on how and if the technology is socialized and spoken of.
If people feel like it's an oppressor, something they don't understand that has rolled in, and now defacto is (is shipped in every distribution of note): it feels like a Military victory. Over them. It sparks no joy.
Appealing to the nerds can be a strong science victory. Preach all your amazingness. I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. There's little science-y reasons.
But there lurk Two Cultures problems everywhere. And figuring out how to bridge the technical to the world, how to sing praises, how to get the world to be interested in relating to, engaging in, giving it the ability to share in some of your wonder and awe: that is what turns Science Victory into a Cultural Victory. And it's what good worthy interesting projects deserve. And it should be an act we do, and help build. We should make appeals to the world, try to get them interested in relating to the upsides, and the downsides to, to give them something worth engaging. I feel like the negative creeps have absolutely slammed their way to Two Cultures wins, to appealing to the world with negativity, and I think some more deliberate, caring, thoughtful work and blogging would make a huge difference in building cultural momentum, in sealing in what ought be a Cultural Victory. That those who know systemd reasonably well largley agree with already, but that many people do not see or understand.
(Am I missing other victory types?)
Yeah this is just a link to the branding page. I do appreciate the discussion of "system 500" at the bottom.
But if you yank out the "brand" from the URL you'll get the actual site.
Sure. These sites are fine rallying points, absolutely.
But they are also very old, and there's very few efforts I've seen to pitch and promote systemd. It's found and enjoyed by a lot of people (particularly those who had to deal with the tangled haphazard sprawl of cobbled together systems from the before times), it makes nicely visible what is happening on the system, integrates cgroups and good least capabilities practices.
But it feels to me like there ought be more ongoing and vocal celebration of this, enjoyment of this. More rallying points that trumpet the wins, that page people in to how nicely this helps. I want to see more positive tech advocacy, is what I'm saying. This is a fine site, yes, with lots of discussion. I've enjoyed decades of Lennart blog posts too. But I wish there was more. I wish this submission was a blog post of the same title. A fresh take, a fresh spin, on such a worthy-of-treatment topic.
The vision is controversial so a lot of advocates find it easier to promote as an init system.
It tends to be the anti-systemd people who keep saying its not just an init system.
Yeah, and these LEGO blocks are strewn around the room by a 3-year-old just waiting for you to step on them. It's the worst thing, there is no organization in systemd. No rhyme or reason to it.
The basic core service supervision in systemd is great. And nearly everything else around it is bad as a result: command-line utilities, filesystem mount handling, virtualization integration, network configuration, etc.
Just look at systemctl's `--help` if you don't believe me. Why does it have `service-log-level` to set the log level for the target, but not a way to actually _view_ the logs? Or why does it have a top-level `--firmware-setup` flag?
We had reasonable building blocks before systemd...
I think we just have different ideas of what the word "reasonable" means.
I don't think anyone seriously defends sysvinit.
However upstart was totally reasonable.
Upstart was reasonable. So is OpenRC.
A bunch of barely working duck-taped Bash scripts? Hardly reasonable.
You’d be surprised just how often systemd calls bash scripts.
You might have done barely working duck-taped Bash scripts; not eveyone who calls themself a 'system admin' is competent. But actual professionals who ran these systems since the 1970s had carefully written, fully functional scripts and we were quite capable of keeping hundreds and thousands of servers running just fine. Being bad at your job isn't the tools fault.
All Bash scripts are duck-taped by definition. It's a shitty duck-tape language.
> thousands of servers running just fine
Err yeah well you might have noticed these things called "laptops" and "desktops". SysVinit was... fine.. on servers. It worked badly on desktops and not really at all on laptops. I'm pretty sure the post introducing SystemD explained it all in detail if you want to learn something.