systemd cat and GNU cat hugging a Linux cat.
So the old init.d system was better? Come on people, let’s stop infighting. I have zero preference on init systems. You know why? Because they’re just plumbing. Stop this nonsense. Do I click on an init system? Do I use the init system to check my email? Or play games? No. I know poettering can be controversial, but let’s just move on. Run freebsd if you’re so butt hurt.
Yeah, on a desktop I don’t really mind whatever*. On a server however, I think systemd is great and I wouldn’t want to miss it anymore.
* except Debian’s frankenstein systemd + sysvinit combination. Burn it
So much more than an init system though, which I think is why people don’t like it. Personally, the only annoyance I have is I preferred log files over journald.
Its becoming an behemoth and has security disadvantages in theory
Curiously, the cream of the crop in terms of security-focused Linux (i.e. Kicksecure and secureblue) leverage systemd to their benefit.
It is much more secure since it supports proper sandboxing and least privilege
So the old init.d system was better?
because those are our only two options…
I hate this argument so much, because it’s just a fallacy.
There are (and have been) more solid init systems.
ReactOS.
I have no moral or philosophical objections to the design of Windows NT, just the company that makes it and the enshittification. If ReactOS ever becomes stable enough to be daily used I would use it. For now I use LinuxMint and Steam OS at home.
I have a moral objection: backslash () usage in file paths.
Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they’re both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).
If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that’s small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.
I don’t daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my “favorite”.
I had a look at Haiku some months ago. Its single user architecture is an interesting choice. I mean, you don’t need to worry about privilege escalation exploits, if you are always fully privileged /s
Yeah, it doesn’t actually make much of a difference:
Fundamentally the idea of having a separate admin account, which is completely protected, and a user account where everything can mingle together and see everything else, is a 1960s security model. It was originally created for a world where the owner of the computer and the user of the computer were two different people. In that world the user provides all the software that they want to run in their account (they probably wrote it) and the OS’s job is to protect the admin account from users and the users from each other.
Fast forward to the present day and this security model is completely mismatched with the reality of a personal computer. The internet exists, the user and owner are the same person, and they’re probably not writing all their software themselves. A piece of malicious or compromised software can encrypt every file in your user folder, steal your browser history, your saved passwords, and (on xwindows) record your keystrokes and make your screen display anything it wants, all without privilege escalation. But you can rest assured knowing that the user account can’t violate any timeshare limits that the root account placed on it.
The one thing you could argue is that a separate admin account makes it easier to detect and fix a compromised user account, but:
-
Most people are not in the habit of regularly logging into their root account and examining all the processes that are running in their user account. In fact many distributions do not even have a separate root account.
-
If you do think your computer has been compromised the sensible thing is to wipe the disk and restore from backup. It just doesn’t make any sense to fiddle around trying to figure out just how compromised you are and trying to reverse the process in a running system.
-
If you’re running xwindows I hope you never install updates or type your password for any other reason while some malicious software is running, since, as previously stated, anything running under your account can record your keystrokes. In that case your admin account is compromised anyway without having to use any privilege escalation exploits. Can you see how all this stuff was built with the assumption that the user and owner are two separate people with two separate passwords?
With Wayland and containerized applications we are slowly moving away from that 1960s security posture, which is something that’s long overdo. But currently something like Linux Mint is not really much better off than Haiku, from a pure security model standpoint.
In any case its security model is not the interesting thing about Haiku.
I feel the importance of user privileges distinction, as I see it from a server perspective and organization managed devices. Some would argue the insignificance of this in the personal desktops.
However, I believe that the community structure of Linux is benefiting everyone. It is a general purpose kernel, that gets improvements from various different sectors. In the current space, where most servers run Linux and most desktops run Windows, desktops are not benefiting from filesystem or scheduling optimizations implemented for servers.
-
There are few system manager (single project or a mix of components) that use linux features efficiently and none have dev resource remotely comparable to systemd. That’s why in practice systemd is the best system layer implementation on gnu/linux. Android and chromeos userland (upstart derived) are not exactly (freedesktop) gnu/linux.
EDIT: the post ask which OS though. Including userland I like android a lot, but I would say illumos distros (OI currently). illumos has a system management similar to systemd (contracts in place of cgroups for example). Actually systemd was heavily inspired by SMF too.
Why should I not use systemd?
Contrarianism
Perfectly legitimate reason to do/ not do anything
/s
I disagree.
When you want to feel special but not enough to go to the effort of using FreeBSD
I already am special enough, my mom said so
IPv6?
Nobody wants to be like those “special needs” users.
Offended.
because the over 70 different binaries of systemd are “not modular” because they are designed to work together. What makes a monolith is, apparently, the name of the overarching project, not it being a single binary (which again, it’s not)
If I cared about modularity I’d use something like Hurd, but i actually need to get shit done
What makes it a monolith is that the 70 binaries refuse to do their one job (see: Unix philosophy) independently.
A few months ago, a systemd update broke my boot process because I dared set up my device-mapper nodes manually in a minimal initrd without having a second copy of systemd in there as well. The device is there, yet systemd times out “waiting for device”. How come then a manual mount -a in the rescue shell works then?
If course, the bug had already been reported and swiftly rejected by L. “Hurr durr bother your distributor not me” Pottering.
When you’re not using your computer
What a wild concept
If you have to ask, then there’s no reason not to. It’s people who tinker with their systems that encounter issues with it, or more often random annoyances that add up over tme to those memes.
Void, because it works really well on my super low-resource chromebook!
any advice for trying void? Ive heard good things but never really gave it a chance.
The gui installer was roughly about as simple as any other distro I’ve tried, and stuff generally seemed to work out of the box. There are more packages than one might expect from such a small distro too. Not sure I have any advice specific to Void really, although getting a custom bootloader onto a Chromebook was certainly a trip lol
I love cheap Chromebooks for this!! Getting custom bootloader onto them is kinda fun for me atp because I’ve done so many.
The handbook is outstanding. Read as much of it as you can. Even if you’re not a Void user, you’ll learn so much!
As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd? I use Mint and I don’t remember having to interact with that kind of low-level nonsense. The distro maintainers can use whatever reasoning they want to pick these details.
Tribalism exists in every circle, perhaps moreso in tech circles. Ironically anyone who hates on a distro could just switch, or build their own distro if they were so inclined, but it’s often the hating that people participate more in than using their system. Use what works for you, and if it no longer works for you use something else.
If you are just a user, in that a computer is just a tool you use, then you’re right, there’s comparatively little reason to be concerened or even know about the underlying details of the system. If you go further and start making changes to your system, or even building more complex systems, over time you will find yourself forming quite firm opinions about various parts of the underlying system, especially if you’ve had experience with other options.
As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd?
Um, because as a user you may have to deal with services, or other systemd features?
Let’s say you want to start
ssh-agentwhen you login to your desktop environment. Well, there’s a systemd service for that that you can enable, and on another distro you’d have to do it another way (autostart script or something).
“systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time” -Churchill, if he had been a nerd
Probably Artix, because it’s like Arch, and I use Arch btw
There is an openrc package in aur, so perhaps arch can use non-systemd init as well.
Would probably be a hell to actually implement, as everything is made for systemd (as in, all packages rely on systemd for being run)
Arch can absolutely use other init systems though it is officially unsupported
Scans room
Windows 11.
Chaotic neutral
Init is just that bad. /s
The tasteful thickness of it
An hour in and no mention of Slackware yet?
No, but I use Arch btw.
or Artix btw, if we’re in the non-Systemd world
+1 for slackware. rock solid distro.
Thanks for making me not the first person to mention slackware for once. I don’t have any beef with systemd. It’s just foreign to me. I installed slackware some time in the late 90s and found my life’s calling.
Alpine.
Have used crux but using low end / old hardware results in almost permanent building software.
I wonder how far we are from CI drivers ala Nix that fork builds out to idle hardware like a distributed torrent network. As someone with three out of tree modules in use, there must be dozens of us I’d like to think.
That is something I’ve already run into at my previous workplace. The name escapes me atm…
Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn’t need Linux for work reasons.
This feels like an “I would switch to Linux if I didn’t need Windows for work” comment from another universe.
Fair point. :-)
At the end of the day, the OS has to run the software/applications one needs to get shit done… if it is macOS or Windows, that’s okay.
In my defense, I ran NetBSD for several years a long time back, and it was one of the best OS experiences I ever had. I am just old/pragmatic/flexible enough, to choose setups with less friction, if possible. ;-)
Still, I think it is a shame that Linux mostly took over the UNIX world and the BDS are left for hardcore nerds/embedding/game consoles and Solaris and co are not viable options anymore. Portable software and its stability benefited a lot from bugs detected on other platforms (OpenBSD was always a forerunner here).
BSD is to Linux users what Linux is to Windows users.
Not sure what you want to express. I actually used BSD a long time back, and the quality/documentation/coherence/beauty of the system are/were just on another level… Running Debian for nearly a decade now, because of compatibility (with hardware and software I need)… Linux improved a lot in the last nearly 3 decades and I am happy it exists, still I would be more happy if the BSDs would have stayed at least on an equal footing.
I think the comment speaks for itself. There wasn’t anything deep behind it. It literally just mean “Linux users look at BSD users how Windows users look at Linux.” Bewildered, mystified maybe? It’s just lower on the “food chain”, and they are surprised to see people using it because it’s missing “X” feature they can’t live without, for many people that being gaming. I’m in the same camp.
It was not a comment on the quality of the software, as I have never used it. I would love to tinker with it one day to see the differences, but I can’t see myself ever switching to it, even if I admire/envy some of the better parts compared to Linux.
Thanks for clarification!
… and I think you are point on, by now, the ship has sailed. I could use FreeBSD/OpenBSD on servers, but I’d rather run Debian everywhere. On desktops and for day to day usage, the BSDs are no viable options anymore, they simply lack support for common hardware (Wifi etc.) alone and the BSDs will realistically never be able to catch up the chasm anymore.
I feel there’s a similar relation between Mac :: Ubuntu (me) :: Arch.
I try to explain to folks that I have very little interest in anything outside of /home. I truly use Ubuntu because I like the desktop and Steam works and I have all the dev tools I need. But a certain type of otherwise competent Mac-using developer thinks I must be a 1337 h4x0r to even dare to use Linux for actual work.
Any “hate” in regards to you using Ubuntu is more likely to do with controversy involving Canonical than it is you using a beginner-friendly distro. People are more likely to be kinder to the Mint user.
Fediverse has its own baseline.
Debian, installed without systemd as per the wiki. So far I’ve not hit any issues, whilst I’ve recently ended up diving through both kernel and systemd code to find the root cause of an issue I was hitting on one server. I could have just bodged past it, but I wanted to actually understand what the issue was, and what else it was going to affect.
Maybe a stupid question, but is the thing you did fundamentally different from Devuan?
Honestly, I’m not sure, I was looking at Devuan, but then noticed that Debian supported sysvinit natively so I went that route instead. I figure that sticking to the source distro was going to give me fewer headaches, and so far it’s been plain sailing.
