this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Of all the people who have incredibly strong opinions about not-so-incredibly important things, the virulently anti-systemd crowd are among the ones that baffle me the most.
There are many legitimate complaints. Bundling a bunch of services into a single binary goes completely against Unix philosophy. Systemd changing from text to binary logs is my pet peeve.
Copying how Windows does things isn't necessarily the best.
You know it's not a single binary, right ? Systemd is a bunch of different, mostly single usage, mostly optional, binaries. As far as Unix philosophy goes, Systemd is definitely following the principles, which is not the case for the Kernel for instance.
As for the binary logs, I used to hate it, but then, not having to manually parse logs for filtering is really nice.
I do have my issues with Systemd, but it not following the Unix philosophy is not one of them.
It's not people disliking it that makes no sense to me; everyone has their opinions.
I just can't imagine having the level of anger displayed by some of the most vocal of the anti-systemd crowd.
If your favorite thing is being ruined and you can't stop it, I can understand frustration being displayed as anger.
It's the same when Windows users get angry at things like OneDrive. It's forced on them and they don't want to have to work around removing it like people having to work around how Gnome is integrated into systemd.
I was annoyed with binary logs until I found cases where compressing logs was literally 10x or more improvement, like if you ran into a bug that just repeatedly spit the same log.
And I know logrotate compresses text logs too but if you're going to compress logs into tar.gz, might as well just make it binary by default and have a nice interface (journald) on top
From The Unix Hater's Handbook
(I like Linux, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows)
That head/tail thing is kind of a goofy argument. For one thing they aren't duals;
tailis naturally more complex because the end of a file often changes and the application can optionally keep showing you the new output. Also, the fact that they're separate applications in the first place is arguably better than the a one-application approach, which would always require a command line switch to select between outputting the start or end of a file. And finally, while I guess this could vary between implementations ofheadandtail, mine has identical switches for all the common options.I initially agreed with your take there but I actually think they're a great argument for their point.
headandtailare the exact same abstraction. Their implementations will be quite different, but they both serve "provided this data, give me these lines". Consider instead that these are simply operations on arrays and actually they map perfectly to Python slices:data[:10]anddata[-10:]. This abstraction mapping also shows that, imo, the tool should providedata[n:m]and it would still be entirely consistent with the Unix philosophy. In fact, this tool exists in the Unix toolkit:sed -n n,mp. Three tools then are currently required for the simple concept of "slice lines". I also think it's a bit of a mess. You could replaceheadwithsedfairly easily:sed -n '1,10p'but nottail(it is possible, but quite slow and very opaque)As an aside I actually found this quite frustrating myself because I don't like reaching for
sedin then:mcase (I always forget and end up pipingheadtotail) and ended up writing my own tool for essentially this style of slicing input, also replacing probably my least favorite use of my least favorite Unix tool,dd, to slice arbitrary byte sequences. The tool doesn't feel overloaded and I use it quite often.(I'm sure many people have written this same tool. There is probably a widely known open source option that I've just never come across)
They could have been two commands that call a single parent command with different options. For example, imagine if
cathad an option-Nto restrict the number of lines that was printed, and also an option-tto start from the end.headwould just proxy tocat -Nand tail would proxy tocat -N -t. Combining the three into a single implementation reduces total LoC and opportunity for bugs. Also reduces total maintenance burden.I believe
busyboxis like this actually - a ton of Unix commands in a single package. It's used by Alpine Linux, a tiny and performance linux distro commonly used by docker containers.There's also a few cases of feature and scope creep, including the infamous
systemd-resolved.Systemd, your job is to launch services, manage logs, and do timers and relaunches on a service crash. DNS is out of scope, leave that to existing services.
resolved is entirely optional and disabled by default, I use it on case of non-mobile devices but leave it on laptops etc.
DNS resolution isn't something exotic, it makes sense for systemd to implement it in a simple optional daemon
You've misunderstood something.
systemd-resolved is one of the services that uses systemd's service management system
You're saying "don't use this service management system to manage your services"
I may have written that in a confusing way. I'm saying systemd's job is service management. Systemd-resolved is an unnecessary bit of scope creep.
systemd-resolved is a service. It's not scope-creep. It's its own thing built in the systemd framework.
A single binary? What?
Fast searchable compressed files is a fantastic idea.
The other day on a thread here about "people who use other init systems, why?" and i wrote about my experience with systemd and git downvoted for mysterious reasons. Other people that did the same as me also got their downvote sixpacks. And now they want to make it seem like it's just the people that hate systemd the annoying ones...
Lemmy is just highly opinionated, poor social skills, and often closed minded.
The real problem with systemd is figuring out what's is or isn't part of systemd...
That's easy: If it's a service reasonably expected to be present on most desktop systems, it's part of systemd or will eventually be.
And if it's not expected, it also eventually will be part of systemd.
I hear they will work on a display server next called waylanD or something /s