r/devuan • u/[deleted] • Oct 11 '25
I Hate Systemd
I don’t get how anyone can defend systemd without feeling a little gross. It’s bloated, it’s convoluted, and it breaks the UNIX philosophy on every level. You don’t need a monolithic init that controls everything from logging to network to timers, simple modular tools existed before, and they still work better. The fanboys act like it’s some holy grail just because it’s “modern,” but all it really did was force everyone into a single ecosystem and punish anyone who wants control over their own system.
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Oct 12 '25
I've been using Linux since the early 90s. I've left my computer on for weeks and nothing has stopped. It has always been extremely stable.
After systemd and now wayland, it's horrible, the kernel is updated several times a week, the system crashes, applications freeze. Chrome, nautilus, and others. It's quite complicated...
And we installed it on dozens of computers at the university to teach students how to use operating systems and applications beyond the Windows world.
But it's bone...
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u/gnufan Oct 12 '25
Whilst I've little love for systemd is that based on the latest Debian, as the new gnome-shell crashes aand burns terribly on my old hardware. Now using DE on Xorg, and stability back to normal. Gnome-sgell seems to assume some features not present on older graphics hardware.
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u/Ok-386 Oct 12 '25
I probably dislike systemd more than you (tho for different reasons. I'm a conspiracy nut job) but here you or however is responsible for managing your computers have been doing a few things wrong.
Eg. if you use Ubuntu LTS, which is a popular distro, and don’t enable the HWE stack, you definitely won’t get kernel updates several times a week. Maybe try subtly hinting to your boss that Arch isn’t the best choice for your use case.
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Oct 11 '25 edited Oct 12 '25
I was this way back when it happened. Over the years I've gotten on-board with the pragmatic "it's over, it is what it is, why can't you be like everyone else?"
And then recently I discovered that somewhere higher up in Linux, they did something that prevents MX Linux from offering the very cool CHOICE it has for years: It installs with both init systems. It defaults to sysvinit. If you need systemd, you reboot and choose it (it will continue booting that way until you choose the other). Now, you have to choose at install time. This is a major loss of choice. A major distro's interests ignored. MX was the shining example of the stated linux ethos.
I installed both versions (MX 25 beta 1). Systemd takes 24% longer to boot, and leaves you with 8% less memory. People are migrating from windows with old hardware, and the powers-that-be in Linux are "they can compile their own system if they want. They can install both versions and dual boot. That's still choice." News reports win7's use is increasing. Linux enthusiasts make fun of windows users for being "stupid" (when we're throwing away perfectly good time and memory that would make a much better value proposition to those people. We're supposed to know better, and we're doing this - rationalizing it; and then contemptuously deriding those people for not seeing how lovely this is.).
I get it that "it's still better." But, this is not good. It sounds worse when people minimize it. It's like their religion's being attacked. If MS did this, people would be howling. Linux does it, and it's endless defensiveness.
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u/No-Lunch-1005 Oct 12 '25
Get involved in FreeBSD. There are people working on a management by api system that doesn't suck
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u/DenixSL Oct 18 '25
Unfortunately many young people learned about Linux from Ubuntu. They have no idea what Linux is about. They use it as a freeware app. So they don't mind using systemd or snaps.
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u/cfx_4188 Oct 11 '25
The similarity between Linux and Unix ends with the presence of a terminal in the system. Linux has nothing to do with Unix. Forget about it. I think you'll start to hate the systemd even more if you spend a couple of months working in an operating environment where a fast and agile S6 is installed as the init.
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u/Morgennebel Oct 12 '25
I am a very happy www.devuan.org user since years.
Works fine unless you need GPU special drivers for hashcat or similar...
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u/JaKrispy72 Oct 12 '25
My take on why a lot of distributions use it is that it makes things easier for them because it can cover a lot of what needs to be done with one thing.
Is that a correct take?
I asked someone why they didn’t like MX Linux for a daily driver and it was because it DOESN’T use systemd. I was disappointed with that answer. I use Mint and am good with their choice as it just works. I also have an Arch system that uses it only because it’s just easy to use for me.
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u/mrobot_ Oct 13 '25
I think the only REAL advantage the forsaken d offfers, is defining dependencies and the wanted state of services - so it will start/restart services for you based on the status and these dependencies. Last time I was on a Solaris, it had something very similar and I guess d copied that. Plus it gives you a standardized way to check/start/stop stuff.
I am not sure why d has to bring its own version of timeserver-client and all the other bells and whistles and never-ending sprawling constantly extending its grip on everything. It should have just been a nimble, simple init system with dependencies and a standard way of managing services, that's it. But it turned into an insane, never-ending behemoth.
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u/Jack_Faller Oct 13 '25
I have no clue what it is. Used to use Arch which had SystemD installed, now I use Guix with no SystemD. I cannot tell the difference.
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u/pPandR Oct 11 '25
I mean, I get the distaste but I wouldn't say I hate it. It's just a thing that could be better, but it does run on a lot of machines and it does its job ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/SilentPipe Oct 12 '25
Absolutely. I’m new to Linux, and admittedly my first distro being systemd-less wasn’t the best idea, but it worked extremely well once configured properly.
When I first moved to Linux, I chose Void Linux. It worked great for the first few days, but a week or two of active use exposed some early mistakes in my partitioning, my lack of Linux experience, and dependencies on systemd that didn’t play well with systemd-less machines.
It was still a great distro, and its boot speed was almost instant for me. I could see myself going back to it in a few years once I know Linux better, if the opportunity presents itself.
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u/michaelpaoli Oct 12 '25
Debian. It's a choice. Devan and some other distros, no choice.
# ls -l /proc/1/exe lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Oct 8 02:35 /proc/1/exe -> /usr/sbin/init # readlink /proc/1/exe /sbin /usr/sbin/init usr/sbin # dpkg -S /sbin/init sysvinit-core: /sbin/init # cat /etc/debian_version 12.12 #
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u/ProblemDog88 Oct 12 '25 edited Oct 13 '25
Here we go again. Just start using Linux today?
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Systemd is not monolithic. You can pick and choose which parts of the SUITE that you want. You can use only the init system and nothing else.
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systemd unit files are a god send for resource control, access control and security. You can control every aspect of how a process starts, runs and exits. You can even containerize processes in various ways including running them in a separate namespaces. And all of this, as well as handling any dependencies, can be done from a single service file.
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Systemd starts anything it can in parallel. The speed up gained from this is notable to say the least.
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You can use a distro without systemd. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
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It was intended for servers and mission critical systems where absolute control over these things were a necessity. No one cares if some guy doesn’t want it on his Thinkpad. Desktop use was a complete non-factor. Although I’ve used it on desktop and embedded and it has served its purpose extremely well.
Linux != Unix. Don’t be one of those guys who hate on something and don’t even know how to make use of it just because a group of dweebs online said it’s bad.
Poettering did nothing wrong.
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u/Kurgan_IT Oct 11 '25
While I totally agree, as a professional sysadmin I reckon that there is no way out of systemd, it has infected and enshittified everything, as has the whole dbus idea and all that comes with it. But now it's too late to save ourselves from this.