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How to Avoid Systemd?

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Boot-him?-I-just-met-him! dept.

jbernardo writes:

"Having had several issues with systemd, and really not liking the philosophy behind it, I am looking into alternatives. I really prefer something that follows the Unix philosophy of using small, focused, and independent tools, with a clear interface. Unfortunately, my favourite distro, Arch Linux, is very much pro-systemd, and a discussion of alternatives is liable to get you banned for a month from their forums. There is an effort to support openrc, but it is still in its infancy and without much support.

So, what are the alternatives, besides Gentoo? Preferably binary... I'd rather have something like arch, with quick updates, cutting edge, but I've already used a lot in the past Mandrake, RedHat, SourceMage, Debian, Kubuntu, and so on, so the package format or the package management differences don't scare me."

[ED Note: I'm imagining FreeBSD sitting in the room with the all the Linux distros he mentioned being utterly ignored like Canada in Hetalia.]

 
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  • (Score: 1) by weilawei on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:17PM

    by weilawei (109) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:17PM (#7532)
    The fact that it's binary has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the ability to cryptographically hash things and create a hash chain. You can do that with "plaintext" just fine (since "plaintext" is a special subset of binary; see EBCDIC, ASCII, Unicode, etc.). The fact remains that quality viewers and editors exist for "plaintext", whereas for "binary" formats, I need a more specialized viewer. It breaks the UNIX philosophy BADLY. systemd does too much, in the wrong ways, and is a plague upon Linux.

  • (Score: 0) by Bill, Shooter Of Bul on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:46PM

    by Bill, Shooter Of Bul (3170) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:46PM (#7603)

    Just so you see this, that was my mistake linking binary to the hash chain not anyone elses.

    If it makes you feel better, it can be converted to text very easily. journalctl spits out text, so it can be piped into other text based tools if you want.

    In general, anyone who complains about breaking UNIX philosopy should take a deeper look into it. There are some good reasons why it is the way it is, and why many competing distros have adopted it. They aren't all idiots willing to sacrafice the UNIX way for a flash in the pan. I'd also argue that UNIX is very much a part of systemd, but most who would rationally debate it won't bother to consider any arguments at all.

    • (Score: 1) by weilawei on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:45PM

      by weilawei (109) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:45PM (#7704)

      They aren't all idiots willing to sacrafice the UNIX way for a flash in the pan.

      I've seen this one a lot, but not one single person (not one!) who has said this has provided an actual example of a reason for moving toward a monolithic tool, specifically. Not one single person has raised an actual argument, based on anything more than "they're not idiots" for why it needs to be monolithic, and the bits implemented by systemd couldn't be done better in a modular fashion. Modular code is more maintainable, more extensible, and has a clear separation of concerns--something lacking in systemd. Someone who is a systemd supporter needs to step up to the plate and illustrate how this monolithic structure is better in those categories.

    • (Score: 1) by weilawei on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:49PM

      by weilawei (109) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:49PM (#7707)

      Replying again, since I should have made this point as well. Saying that they're not all idiots who are willing to sacrifice the UNIX way for a flash in the pan, saying that they're maintainers of distros, is not an argument--that's an appeal to authority. Please, stop with the fallacious appeals and provide REAL arguments based in actual software engineering concerns, usability concerns, system administration concerns, etc.. I don't care if you want to play sheep to the shepherd, but I want to know WHY systemd should be monolithic and not modular.