God help me if I ever feel this passionate about systemd.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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OpenRC: Am I a joke to you?
Systemd killed my parents.
Systemd made me bald, and killed my cat.
Whatever works for other people I guess. A good Linux administrator is a person who can work with the default configuration on their OS, and I am trying to be that person and eventually learning inside-outs of systemd.
I'm getting to old for this shit
Hate Microsoft et al., dislike software.
I love systemd!
I got used typing "sudo service --status-all"
then got used to typing "sudo systemctl list-unit-files --type=service"
now a new one to learn "sudo nitroctl list"
looks simpler
That can only be a good thing for my gnarly arthritis fingers.
PoetteringD commands are too damn long
Also automatic paging can go fuck itself
Nice.
I don't hate systemd, but I'll all for having alternatives.
There's so many. People can do whatever they want with their time, but this is certainly not something that was built because there was no option other than systemd
Can someone explain the “we hate systemd” meme for me? I’m not exactly new to Linux but the context is lost on me. Does anyone actually hate systemd?
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.
does everything and breaks unix philosophy, rather than a suite of tools that adhere to it
..for 'itself' versions of 'it'.
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.
systemd does a LOT of things
... incompletely ...
that used to be individual jobs handled by separate things.
So I should hate systemd because IBM’s German subsidiary provided tabulation machines to the Nazis during WW2?
If we don't sanction entities involved in unimaginably horrible crimes are we even human?
That is not what I said. Please reread my post in its entirety.
Seems completely reasonable /s
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.
IMHO systemd tries to go above the requirements of an init system and behave more like an abstraction layer to the OS, in the same way Linux is an abstraction layer to the hardware. Would we be better with a micro kernel, instead of the Linux beast? Maybe, but we do all use it and it is mostly a standard nowadays. Same for systemd. Could it be simpler? Sure! But having a standard abstraction layer at user level for all distros is excellent for an app developer. And, AFAIK, it should be possible, albeit less verified, to disable most features and use alternative implementations.
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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.
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.
That makes sense. I could see how that would irk a lot of people, but I’d personally trust the widely used, intensely scrutinized, load-bearing, open-source processes, over a lesser known one.
Oh, and binary log files.
Yeah those are great… Or do we dislike those too? 🙃
There are a lot of command-line tools for text, like grep and sed, that don't work on binary files. Whether this matters to you depends on your workflow. (I use grep a lot.)
Just journalctl | grep and you're good to go. The binary log files contain a lot of metadata per message that makes it easy to do more advanced filtering without breaking existing log file parsers.
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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.
This. Init having a pretty important role, you would hope being simple and minimal would be a priority. I just try to stick my head in the ground and pretend like it's all ok.
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.
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.
systemd-resolved is a virus. There, I said it.
People hate change and want Linux yo remain in the 70's. Find threads complaining about any change in Linux.
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Hate Systemd?
No, I don't :)
Why do you have to have this xor that? Why can't I like both? I'm sure both have use cases where they work best.
Drop the hate already.
I wonder what new does this bring into the table?
I mean we already have at least these in addition to systemd:
- OpenRC + openrc-init
- s6 + s6-rc
- runit
- Epoch
- dinit
- minit
- GNU Shepherd
- finit
The state being stored in RAM seems like a nifty feature. I like it.
Very quickly glanced... I think it lacks service supervision and user services. Although user services are missing in many others too. Except it looks like users can run Nitro by themselves (autostart via cron @boot maybe?). Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, more choices leads to more ideas being implemented. 👍
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What's the point of all of these init systems if all we ever get are systemd services? You have to manually supervise all services if you'rw not using systemd which is really annoying.
OpenRC works just fine for me
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