[Linux] What are your thoughts on SystemD?

[athenian200]

I wouldn't really consider myself experienced enough to make an informed decision. The only thing I know is that without much debate, most Linux distributions seem to have adopted it and made it increasingly difficult to avoid. Debian has a fork called Devuan over the issue.

The main thing I've noticed is that it seems like SystemD is taking over more and more functionality, and is making itself harder to avoid. Programs that come to depend on SystemD functionality become harder to decouple from it, and thus we end up with more forks and a large number of patches.

Something about the fact that SystemD gives so much control to a single project and makes Linux less modular with fewer options makes me uncomfortable.

So, what do you Linux users out there on ZD think? Is SystemD actually better than previous init systems? Or is something else going on here?

 

[Lilith]

Polarizing? SystemD, imo, deserves most of the criticism/hate it gets. Not necessarily it's "not unix like" or anything, but because it's just a flawed project in its approach and what it's trying to do.. and more importantly not do. SystemD clearly appeals to convenience and ease of use and all that. Which really isn't horrible on its own, but, in the case of SystemD it really is coming at the cost of choice (which is huge in the Linux world) and really just due to the nature of it creating a new potential gaping security hole. With more and more pieces becoming dependent/a part of SystemD, it seems like only a matter of time before an exploit is found that will be as bad as a kernel or drive exploit for Windows NT systems.

Oh, and another thing; runlevels in SystemD are wonky and are a huge escalation of privilege vulnerability. There's a lot of potential to get disk or even admin access theer. So yeah, overall not good and either custom init or OpenRC are far superior.

 

[athenian200]

Yes, that's pretty much what I thought. I saw it as something that puts convenience over security or freedom of choice. I should probably note that I've never been in IT, so I don't have real experience. I really only know what my research and personal experiences using Linux at home would suggest. I'm probably best described as a jack of all trades and a master of none.

I'm pretty sure this would be polarizing, because every time I've brought up the issue on a Linux forum, I've been told that I'm being paranoid for thinking SystemD could be a security risk. Some of them just lock discussions about the matter because of the controversy. And that I'm "sticking with something obsolete" if I want to use another init system. I ended up having to spend a lot of time configuring Gentoo and patching various things in order to get something without SystemD dependencies.

The thing about it is that various smaller projects are being pulled into SystemD, and it's slowly making Linux into something resembling a monolithic operating system. It seems like the goal is to make Linux more like, say, MacOS.

It has become so bad that, last time I checked, many people seemed to be considering switching to alternative projects like FreeBSD to get away from Linux entirely.