this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
29 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
66365 readers
490 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That is a gross misrepresentation of systemd...
It's like saying GNU coreutils is monolithic because all of the individual tools combined are bundled together.
Systemd is comprised of many individual applications.
Even systemd-less distros need to implement 'fake' systemd components. It's like a cancer. No one's voluntarily using sub-components of systemd without systemd. It is a monolithic thing.
You can dislike systemd, its6okay. But there's no need to be stupid about it.
Yes - things built to work with systemd... require systemd to work.
But you don't need to use all the systemd services. You can use other tools. Because systemd is not a monolith.
How does systemd dare to provide useful functionality? It should be just as useless as all the other inits that nobody ever felt the need to depend on, simply because they do nothing interesting.
You can just build a way more functional and secure system with all the cool features systemd provides.
Most of its functionality is just reimplementing things that already existed, with an incompatible interface.
There are significant security/reliability improvements all over the place. E..g. logind actually works as promissed, which none of the clones do as they can not have the necessary infrastructure that is provided by other parts of systemd. Or udev using systemd-pid1 to start services: That fixes a well documented problem with udev starting services itself -- which most non-systemd distributions do till today. Problems do notngo away by ignoring them.
Checkout non-systemd distros, most of them still use group based access to devices a user needs to run wayland. Of course that does not matter at all for X11, security is so poor there anyway.
Yeah, but things like human readable logs are almost all gone because of journalctl changes that went into the systemd ecosystem without anyone really running by folks who look at logs everyday.
It's not the functionality of systemd I don't like, it's the Poettering way of just making changes to stuff without bothering to learn how any of the rest of us professionally use things.
Yeap, you now get logs from all stages of the boot process, and you notice logs going bad or getting manipulated. It's a huge step forward for Linux, especially for people that look at logs every day. They can finally trust the logs to be correct and complete.
And it is not even a change: I have never had real unix servers with plain text logs in 30 years working with them. Proper computers have always stored logs in databases or whatever. That's actually a legal requirement in many parts of the world for many kindsmof servers.