SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.
I’m old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don’t see that as an issue anymore. I don’t have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).
My 2 questions:
- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
It’s a massive question, and I think quite a lot of the argument comes from the fact that it depends what direction you’re answering it from.
As a user, do I like being able to just
systemctl enable --now whatever.service, and have a nice overview of ‘how’s my computer’ insystemctl status? Yes, that’s a big step up from symlinking run levels and other nonsense, much easier.As an administrator, do I like having services, mounts and timers all managed in one way? Yes, that is very nice - can do more with less, and have to spend less time hunting for where things are configured. Do I think that the configuration files for these are a fucking mess of ‘just keep adding new features in’ and the override system is lunacy? Also yes.
As a developer trying to do post-mortem debugging, who just wants all the logs in front of him for some server that’s gone wrong somehow, which I often have to request via an insane daisy-chain of emails and ‘Salesforce nonsense that our tech support use’ from our often fairly non-technical end users, on some server that I’ve no other access to? No, I do not find having logs spread between
/var/logand journalctl (and various CloudFormation logs in a web console) makes my life easier. I would be pleased if that got sorted out.tl:dr; mostly an improvement, some caveats.
As someone who recently started learning linux properly by setting up arch, systemd is nice. It does a lot of things that make life easier for me and it never gets in the way.
I didn’t know that logging question is related to SystemD, so thanks for telling it! As an non-top class desktop user the same thing frustrates especially because the solution is often simpler and not found from those logs.