My view on systemd

In mt opinion systemd is a huge pain.

SystemD in my eyes is a tool developed by corporation (RedHat) for other corporations (their customers). RedHat guys (and other kinds) have many things (tools, configs, manuals, trainings, webinars…) prepared for it and thus it would be pain for them to stop using it.

Other corporations like it because it has support from other corporation which they can call when there is a problem and it is mostly one package which contains almost all basic stuff they will need. I see this as major selling point for it since huge corporations do not wish to play with small things, for them it is better to spend more money and buy something. In other words, it can give a lot of people work and thus a good livelihood.

Now when I look at it from the point of normal user like myself I do not see those benefits which might come into account if I was a huge corporation. All I see is a needlessly overcomplicated huge mess given (forced on) to me for testing purpose, so that the major bugs can be solved before it is used by huge corporations.

Next I see it as perfect example of EEE strategy (Embrace - Extend - Extinguish).
https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/img/systemd-devours-all.gif

I dare to say we are at Extinguish phase since other projects which were providing similar functionality (see image above) to some parts of systemd are simple gone (or part of systemd now).

I also see it as a “killer” of a bit chaotic environment in Linux/open source world. I like the chaotic (modern word would be diverse) environment of Linux open-source world while systemd tries to bring some uniformity into this “chaos”.

PS: If you think systemd is just an init you are not thinking hard enough. Systemd is (as mentioned in some presentation about systemd I watched somewhere a long time ago) a system between kernel and user programs. (lets think of it in similar way Apple is doing things, you do not directly contact kernel or HW, you use their libraries to do the job you want).

PS2: Maybe the bar is too high up and thus people expect for everything to work in same way without any effort.

Enough of my rumbling.

Have a nice day.

This post is a bit refined version of my rumbling on Artix forum: https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,1939.msg16354.html#msg16354

PS3: While polishing this post I wanted to write a bit more but it looks like the stars are not in my favour to do that.