> The log of OS components successfully starting up, as indicated by the green [ OK ], is what many people already identify systemd with. This made it a natural choice to derive our visual identity from.
That's an interesting comment, since the green [ OK ] was in use for bootup messages long before systemd was a thing. Nothing about it says "systemd" to me.
It's a tasteless trait of Linux bootup processes since long before SystemD's existence (on RH, SuSE at least), along with totally accessible blue-on-black (wtf) terminal colors.
The comment is true for me, though. When I see a linux machine boot up and display a series of aligned [ OK ]s on the left-hand side, I know instantly that it's using systemd. I don't remember seeing [ OK ] with sysvinit, or at least not as uniformly.
It depended on the distro. Red Hat was using it for a long time, which I suspect is why systemd has it, too. Look here at 24:40 - this is Red Hat 9, released in 2003:
https://youtu.be/QKtzfwyspU0?t=1300
Gentoo also did it from the get go, although it's not SysV.
Except you don't know really know that. It is objectively true that such usage was around for a long time before systemd in some major distros. I was seeing it at least 10 years ago, and I still see it on my systems that don't use systemd.
Well, I could be reasonably sure that it was, at least before I learned today that there were other init systems that also displayed their output like that. So, the statement:
> the green [ OK ], is what many people already identify systemd with
is true for people like me that were not familiar with those other systems.
For example, most probably use Ubuntu (and probably only Ubuntu), and as far as I know it didn't display those [ OK ] until after it adopted systemd. So, at least there's a very large portion of users that never saw those [ OK ] until systemd came along.
If I remember right, it was the same case with Archlinux, which is where I was first exposed to systemd.
Imagine, the biggest news in your distro is the migration to systemd and the first and most obvious change you notice is that the boot process has all these neat [ OK ]s instead of random text. I think it's to be expected that people would identify systemd with that.
I like systemd precisely because the components are nicely integrated with each other. It seems like what we would design after learning the lessons of the last 15-20 years of how to manage a linux/unix machine.
I would assume more programmer types would like that the redundant "intelligence" that was placed in every init script is now gone, and replaced by a common core that allows you to declaratively say what's different about your daemon (or mount, timer, etc). I've also read that systemd has smart defaults, which is a great thing overall over init scripts.
I don't know if this is true, but I would also guess that it makes learning for newer people easier, since you have a similar paradigm and set of tools for your services, mounts, timers, etc.
It's consistent, which is great if you don't want to learn 20 different ways of doing things.
But then again, I also love the ideas from MS PowerShell and wish we had something like that in the *nix world, so we could pipe objects around rather than having to work with text and use awk, sed, cut, print, and all those things to keep legacy workflows around from decades ago. So maybe I'm just weird :)
When the default became breaking of screen, tmux, emacs --daemon, nohup, etc, I started disliking systemd. That the major distributions have overridden that default does not excuse systemd from having made that default.
Building a Linux distro was like playing with Lego: the pieces were very interchangeable (in practice there were difficulties, but usually ones that were fun and rewarding to resolve; "fun and rewarding" is the exact opposite of SystemD).
SystemD also fails quietly or with useless errors and makes problems hard to diagnose - so a bug not directly caused by SystemD looks like it comes from SystemD because SystemD slime is on everything - is extremely poorly-documented, extremely over-engineered, and subject to rapid change due to the moodiness and instability of the OverPoetter.
I will say on the flip side - Going from cron jobs to Systemd timers has been super helpful. You can use journalctl to track the output and find pesky issues like difference in shell, missing environment variables, file permission issues.
The short version is that Unix has traditionally been built around small tools, well-tested and optimized, that did one thing and did it very well. Systemd is often perceived as kind of a "betrayal" of that idea, as a big system that tries to do everything. A lot of mistrust comes from that criticism.
To add to that, small tools are beneficial to the ecosystem, because they can be replaced as needed. Systemd takes advantage of this to replace existing tools, but cannot itself be easily replaced.
> Can someone share the reasons why systemd generate so much hate ?
A handful of improvements came tied to a bunch of new constraints and limitations that were not mandatory to get those improvements. This annoys the people who deal in those less visible areas and got the short end of the stick.
A large chunk of what systemd does could have been implemented without also sprawling it's tentacles and cross-dependencies into everything. Had they rolled out that featureset first and given the rest of the ecosystem some time to evolve in response adoption would have gone much smoother.
Let me ask the other end. What context do you have to compare it to what it replaced for any given use case? Can you tell me why its good? Can you tell me why its better? What problems it "fixes"?
Reasons to dislike systemd as a professional sys admin?
Indeed, what a shame. Firmware is so crappy that deleting variables bricks it, and the Linux kernel decides to expose those variables as a filesystem so that a simple shell command like rm -rf will actually delete EFI variables, instead of exposing them via ioctl like FreeBSD did [1]. As you can see, if systemd hadn't been invented there would be no problem.
That's about my experience too. Systemd just works. It's easy to create new systemd units for all kind of dependent services and resources. Be it server or desktop; systemd just does it's thing and it's bloody good at it.
I agree that regular users should not debate this , but I seen admins critiquing systemd and regular users trending on defending systemd and on linux reddit the topics are always locked instead of moderating the bad actors.
As an example GDM/GNOME should not depend on systemd components and they should accept patches to support alternatives.
Just because there's a vocal minority that complains very loudly doesn't mean it doesn't work for most users out there.
The distribution maintainers have spoken; systemd is a vastly superior to any alternative out there. It's no contest, really. It makes building and maintaining complex and dynamic system setups laughably easy. So easy that just about every distribution maintainer threw their arms up in the air and said "Fuck that constantly breaking, inconsistent, unportable, unmaintainable init script shit that's SystemV and move to some thing sane."
I've yet to work with a system engineer that dislikes systemd. Has Not Yet Happened.
People complaining about systemd is like people complaining that these newfangled LED lights are not producing enough heat.
> Just because there's a vocal minority that complains very loudly doesn't mean it doesn't work for most users out there.
That's not adequate in itself. If we were talking about a database that only lost data if your last name started with "Z", then JWZ would probably be quite vocal about it. Even if it worked fine for you and me, that would be a serious problem. If systemd (or anything else) had a major design flaw, that would be important even if most people don't get bitten by it.
> I've yet to work with a system engineer that dislikes systemd. Has Not Yet Happened.
I've heard from plenty who dislike it. Plenty who love it, too, to be sure! But there's definitely a non-negligible set of sysadmins who don't care for it.
> People complaining about systemd is like people complaining that these newfangled LED lights are not producing enough heat.
More like people complaining that every now and then it catches their loft on fire, but so rarely that everyone else thinks it's peachy.
> Just because there's a vocal minority that complains very loudly doesn't mean it doesn't work for most users out there.
Yes, obviously.
> The distribution maintainers have spoken; systemd is a vastly superior to any alternative out there.
This seems like a logical leap. Sure, distros have spoken -- but that doesn't speak to whether or not systemd is generally superior. It only speaks to it being acceptable for distros.
> People complaining about systemd is like people complaining that these newfangled LED lights are not producing enough heat.
I don't see that parallel at all. But I guess it doesn't matter.
What I do know is that I've used systemd a lot, and it certainly has its benefits. But it also has its drawbacks. Personally, the tradeoff is not acceptable to me.
This is why systemd has spurred me to stop using Linux in favor of BSD.
Yes, there are a number of good distros that don't use systemd. But I see a problem coming down the pike -- as more and more applications start depending on systemd services, systemd will become less optional. For now, that problem can be addressed using shims, but I don't think that will be true forever.
I have a lot of Unix machines, so longevity is important to me. I'm switching to BSD now because it seems to me that the sooner I get that done, the less painful it will be to do. It's a huge task as it is!
They wrote down the details of how they made their logo; the typeface they used, the colors they used, and the reasoning behind it. I guess they could have just uploaded the design file.
I'm gonna guess this is the information Tobias Bernard (the designer) provided them after creating the logo. This is basic design/UI stuff in my mind.
I do find it a little funny they don't use 'systemd green' for the hyperlinks on the page, and instead use a different, similar color.
What's the big deal? It's a non-commercial, non-market, FOSS undertaking that affects the majority of users and systems. "Brand" implies a commercial, for-profit market entity. The idea of "brands" should stay within the for-profit realm, but unfortunately, young people who fell victim to brain slugs (aka corporate interns who hone their skills by "taking part in free software" in their spare time) think it's a good idea to spread this logic of for-profit companies even further, to places where it is NOT needed. It's a kind of "corporate capitalism with a human face" cr_p. And that "friendlier face to new contributors" argument is bull__it, since programmers who want to contribute to foss software are not a herd of scared animals that needs 'friendly' visual cues, and usually know what they are doing. Besides, systemd's development is centralized, and its scope is too large for a single beginner contributor, so it's ideology, like a smiley face and "Welcome!" on a fence of private property.
They didn't even ask their users about their logo, why? They decided to act like an isolated corporate entity instead, contrary to precepts of non-proprietary software. I don't think community development is even a thing nowadays, everything is semi-corporate.
Seems pretty standard.. and while I appreciate that branding work, I feel like it's not like a ton of work or money went into it.
I've seen small-ish FOSS projects having long debates on uppercase vs lowercase in logos, libre fonts, etc. And why not, even if we don't always agree with the end result, art does tend to help build a community :)
Ah that is true. That reminds me that they should only be an init system and not Cthulhu.
Friendly reminder that they managed to infiltrate all distros by creating a hard dependency from GNOME to systemd, which they could only pull off because both projects belong to the same corporation.
systemd is part of freedesktop.org (https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/)
> freedesktop.org is a completely volunteer organisation with no corporate backing or funding stream. We are a member project of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., for the purposes of holding assets.
meanwhile gnome has it's own foundation at https://www.gnome.org/foundation/
> The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.
GNOME and systemd are funded almost completely by Red Hat and their biggest contributors are full-time Red Hat employees.
GNOME does not run at all without systemd.
Even the biggest Linux distros, like Gentoo, struggle to create a patchset to modify GNOME so it does not require systemd; every new version of GNOME takes months to reach Gentoo stable. Most distros have bent the knee and switched to systemd because they had no other option, as GNOME is the most used Linux desktop so they kinda call the shots.
That makes it sound pretty sinister. Personally I like systemd and the fact that it’s widely deployed. Time spent learning it feels productive in a way that learning about the internals of specific distros doesn’t.
Oh, I was just piling on another comment that's a dig at the ever increasing footprint of SystemD. I'm not opposed to branding effort by any FOSS project, identity is important. This effort by SystemD is a "good thing" but, I'm not likely rep their kit
It's probably dangerous to wear a systemd T-shirt in some places. You also probably don't want to have a systemd bumper car sticker in those same places either.
Hopefully all those rabid programmers who'd start fights with each other over a t-shirt about a suite of software, have moved to SF already so the rest of the world don't have to deal with that.
I think it's great graphic design, wasted on a project that doesn't need branding or identity, and certainly doesn't need any more publicity than it already has. That logo could have been used on something that brought joy into people's lives.
Segregation brought joy into some people's lives. I'm sure Stalin was quite happy about engineering the famine in the Ukraine. Every great human-created disaster was pleasing to someone. There are inevitably people who enjoy conflict, destruction, and tragedy. I mean that this logo is a waste of graphic design in the sense that the SS uniform is one of the finest examples of uniform design ever made, but wasted on an organization that would have been better off never existing.
Are you seriously comparing systemd with some of the worst crimes against humanity ever?
If so please look in the mirror. If not serious and just jokingly, please consider how you got to a place where you thought that was a rational and decent thing to do.
He was in a lot of pain and wanted to die on his own terms. He was an advocate for dying with dignity, and his last message was to help normalize euthanasia. The creepiness you feel is your impetus to work through your feelings about death and come to terms with it, to admire his incredible clarity and mental ease without having to couch it in "it's his choice" terms. I thought at the time it was a touching piece of humanity and I am grateful he was bold enough to express it.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my first message. I absolutely support the same thing and I don't mean creepy in a bad way. Maybe eerie is a better word for what I feel about public messages before passing away. I have no problem with voluntary eutanasia
Friends and I paid him a visit when he was already living on borrowed time.
It was what he really wanted.
I fondly remember the July 2005 party we had at his Molenbeek warehouse after defeating the EU software patents directive. His 4am African music and dance demonstration. Memories...
That's an interesting comment, since the green [ OK ] was in use for bootup messages long before systemd was a thing. Nothing about it says "systemd" to me.