Linux

Closing this comment as: won't fix.

Most people think it's a single executable that does everything and breaks unix philosophy, rather than a suite of tools that adhere to it, which is what it is.

It was highly contentious for a number of years - largely because it had a lot more functionality and touched more parts of the OS than the init systems it was designed to replace. It was seen as overzealous by the naysayers.

I was in the never system-d camp for a long time because I felt like my ability to choose was being removed. Even some distros that provided alternate init systems eventually went systemd-only.

But I’ve come around - it’s fine, good even - though ultimately I had no choice or say in it.

It’s very straightforward and easy to write one’s own units. It’s reasonably easy to debug and often helpful when something isn’t working as expected.

Like all things in the world of software, many folks are going to try (and eventually succeed) to make a better mousetrap.

This particular init system’s design goals seem (at least to me) to indicate a focus on small, embedded and/or more secure systems where the breadth of tools like systemd are a hindrance.

Does anyone actually hate systemd?

It's a little too monolithic and kitchen-sink-including for my liking. It doesn't feel like the "do one thing and do it well" style, it has a pretty large attack surface as a result.

Oh, and binary log files.

Systemd is a very good chunk of code. It does the thing and it does it well. Nobody is arguing that systemd does a bad job at this point.

The problem is systemd does a LOT of things that used to be individual jobs handled by separate things. This is a potential security problem as it makes systemd a fantastic target. It’s in charge of so many things that if you pwn systemd, you can get that system to do anything you want.

Another concern are the ties to red hat. Red hat is not your friend. They are not to be trusted. Especially not right now. Remember who owns them, IBM, were quite friendly with the Nazis before and are looking like they are totally fine with being friendly with them again.

That last one is more of a tinfoil hat concern than a technical one, but at this point the tinfoil crowd have been proven right more often than wrong so it’s something to consider.

Because systemd replaced too many important components users still wanted to keep using... and politics. Not many people like Lennart (the guy who started the project). Politics ruin everything.

For me the breaking point was systemd-journald. Corrupted journal when you desperatedly needed to know what went wrong was too much. Last time I gave systemd a try was several years ago... Something like 5 to 7 years, so things might have changed a lot.

Also I'm in the minority here. I like to custom my system components too. systemd just doesn't fit there. Also I administrate one lightweight, low power box, which uses musl libc. Last time I checked systemd needed glibc.

Enough ramblings. Here's some reading for you... note that there's most probably very biased technical writings here and there, so use common sense and verify the claims if you want the real truth. Then judge yourself, don't let anyone else judge for you.

• https://nosystemd.org/
• https://www.without-systemd.org/

Because it tries to do too much. Boots can fail because some random thing is broken. Just goes against the unix philosophy of a tool for a specific job.

It oversteps because the creators found it to be convenient.

Copacking default services for networking and time synchronization and other systems with the init make sense for a specific usecase but god bless you if you need to use a different service as you track down the various configuration options to disable functionality.

It works amazing as a service management tool but the prebaked services it provides generally cause more problems than they solve.

People hate change and want Linux yo remain in the 70's. Find threads complaining about any change in Linux.

Two groups of people went to war over a difference of opinion.

1. New! Different! Change! Bad!

2. Hey, this works better than the old way. Let's use this instead.

On a modern system built around modern philosophies, its convenient. Doing stuff on systemd seems very intuitive to me and feels like a bit less work than the alternatives (atleast from my non-developer POV). If systemd hadn't become the standard maybe my opinion would be different, but most of the time it "just works".

On an older system, the alternatives are definitely lighter! If you're in the group of people who believes every megabyte counts, you care about systemd. There are also oldschool tech nerds who believe systemd is insecure (they might be right idk anything).

No, it's just something systemd proponents claim to shit on alternatives and their users.

Sure, I dislike systemd or at least some of its components and how they're designed, and I find the vocal systemd proponents (especially those that still find the need to be vocal about it in 2025) to be some of the most annoying people in the entire Linux community. But I use it on some systems and it works fine for the most part. Hate is a strong word for a software choice.

Can't have it with any alternative init and rc in the same repo or do this and fiddle with wrappers and shims. Yees, OpenRC is the exception; because it was built as a drop-in and only does rc really.

In short, Systemd is a kraken that always grows arms. And they shit code like me after Taco Bells; it took years until we got seatd as alternative to way-too-big logind. Xorg is holy compared to their code quality.

I do.