Systemd is incredibly versatile and most people, including myself, are unaware of its full potential. Despite its usefulness, it is often overlooked due to controversy and the current state of things when it comes to software development. Begin today your journey thought Systemd's capabilities and discover how to efficiently manage systems with fewer processes than traditionally used.

After a few conversations with people on Lemmy and other places it became clear to me that most aren’t aware of what it can do and how much more robust it is compared to the usual “jankiness” we’re used to.

In this article I highlight less known features and give out a few practice examples on how to leverage Systemd to remove tons of redundant packages and processes.

And yes, Systemd does containers. :)

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      266·
      1 year ago

      Ah yes, a piece of software that people can choose to use or not use is just like an unexpected, devastating disease that no one in their right mind would ever choose to have and that causes huge amounts of suffering and can be incredibly difficult or impossible to treat.

      Yep, cancer patients and survivors totally think having cancer is just like using systemd. 🤦🏻‍♀️

      • hansmeiser666@lemmy.world
        835·
        1 year ago

        Except you’re NOT free to choose, every major distro shoves it into your face

        And it BEHAVES like cancer, that’s what I meant

        • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
          294·
          1 year ago

          Except you’re NOT free to choose, every major distro shoves it into your face

          You can’t have been using Linux long if you think this is what not being free to choose means.

          Don’t use a “major distro”, use one made by likeminded folks. Example: https://www.devuan.org/

          Why do major distros have to make only the decisions you want them to make? Bugs the shit out of me that Gnome is the default desktop damn near everywhere, but so what? Are you paying their bills or otherwise contributing to some degree that they should change their decisions to suit you?

          Here’s a list from 2021: https://www.howtogeek.com/713847/the-best-linux-distributions-without-systemd/

          Another from2022: https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/

          Or build LFS without systemd.

          Or build Arch yourself without systemd.

          Want to remove it from Ubuntu? Here you go. I’m sure there are similar howtos for most major distros.

          The freedom of Linux and FLOSS is that you can roll up your sleeves and do it differently if you want to. Not that anyone owes it to you to do it for you. For that you have to hope other folks who have rolled up their sleeves have the same opinions you do - and in this case, some do!

          I have no concern about your opinion on systemd. But you seem really confused about what freedom is.

        • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
          213·
          1 year ago

          How is that different to when every distribution shoved their implementation of sysv-init into your face? You were never free to choose your init, it always came from the distribution. You could (and still can) replace the init system, if you are willing to do the work involved.

          That’s the whole point: Nobody is willing to do the work for one distribution, if they can just improve systemd and fix a whole bunch of distributions at once. That’s why developers flock to the systemd umbrella project to implement their ideas there, which is why systemd keeps getting cool be features for the plumbing layer of Linux – which is far more than just the init system.

        • GlowHuddy@lemmy.world
          102·
          1 year ago

          Thinking about it from your point of view, maybe MS was right and Linux is a cancer too. Technically it behaves similarly to systemd, since most Unixes are actually Linuxes nowadays (excluding BSD ofc, but they are still in the minority, similarly to alternatives to systemd). It even is a binary blob as well!

          Should every distro use/develop a different kernel? Should we focus our resources on providing alternatives and again have a multitude of different Unix versions, every incompatible with each other? Isn’t it better that we have this solid foundation and make it as good as it can be?

          Overall I think standardization of init is not so bad, just like adopting the Linux kernel was. It is actually quite nice that you can hop from distro to distro and know what to expect from such a basic thing as init process.

          Anyways, in Linux land you actually have a possibility to replace it. Granted, it is not as easy, however there are plenty of distros that allow you to ditch systemd in favor of something else.

        • Jajcus@kbin.social
          7·
          1 year ago

          Every major distro uses systemd, because before that it was nearly impossible to properly implement things that distros have to provide.
          Most startup scripts were incredible set of hacks to make services behave. Those were very inefficient (they could not be efficient being shell scripts calling other commands for various simple repetitive tasks) and would often break when circumstances were different from ideal.

          Systemd just makes building Linux distribution much easier, and the resulting system is more reliable, more consistent and more flexible. Why would distro developers chose anything else?

        • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
          52·
          1 year ago

          Missing my point. It’s a shitty comparison that is incredibly insensitive towards people who suffer with cancer and their friends and family.

    • Sandbag@lemmy.world
      134·
      1 year ago

      How on earth can you say that? Systemd, while not perfect, creates a system that helps newbies come in and understand Linux, helps Linux grow. Afterwards they can shift to a non systemd distro, but systemd provides a valuable tool.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
        6·
        1 year ago

        Hmm that’s an interesting take on systemd. Not sure if anyone would be pivoting to a non-systemd distro after experiencing it… Well I’ve been using Linux before systemd and I wouldn’t switch back to what we had before simply because it makes my life easier in so many ways.

        But yes, I see how less fragmented and more approachable a systemd distro will look for a beginner.

      • gian @lemmy.grys.itEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        creates a system that helps newbies come in and understand Linux, helps Linux grow.

        Not sure about this.

        A new user probably don’t care (and rightly so) about how a certain service is started or stopped, it just need to work, which was true even before systemd.

      • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
        165·
        1 year ago

        Same reason as for all those years these old people are holding a grudge for…

        It is not Unix philosophy (nothing is these days), it does not solve any problem they ever had (it does), it is no improvement over what we had before (it is) and even makes some broken and moronic things harder (it does), it is insecure (it improves overall system security), and it is one monolithic blob (it is not). Before systemd nothing depended on the init system (true, but then it did nothing useful that made having such a dependency worthwhile), and before systemd we were all free to use other init systems and distributions did not pick one for their users (they always did, offering additional inits only as unsupported iption just likenthey do now).

        That’s the typical list you get.

        Oh, and it was shoved down all our throats by the mighty Lennart himself, backed by several multi billion dollar companies that brided thousands of distribution developers to destroy Linux (it was not).

        Funnily enough it is pretty much the same BS we had when that monster of complexity called sysv init was introduced into distributions, replacing a simple script with a forest of symlinks. Of course the community was much smaller then and so we had a loser number of idiots to shout at everybody else.

        • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
          61·
          1 year ago

          It seems that, in many people’s view, it’s better to have janky scripts starting systems, having to delegate logging management and service monitorization to the services themselves or cumbersome tools poorly used by most distros such as logrotate? Systemd offers a good thing, easy configuration and IT DOES fix a LOT of issues. People who never tried it won’t see how better it is, just try it… like I did 10 years ago.

          One of the moments where we see the true power of systemd is when we use it for containers and suddenly realize that the tools used to manage the system such as systemctl and journalctl can be used to inspect and affect a container without even having to enter it. Another equally interesting moment in the systemd journey is when you’ve an ARM system with 512MB of RAM or even less and you figure out that it will save you precious resources for other things.

        • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
          92·
          1 year ago

          The fact the original website is no longer available tells us a LOT about it. Maybe the server running it crashed because it didn’t have proper service monitoring… or all the init jankiness was wasting so much resources the guy paying for the server run out of money :D

          Now in all seriousness: I don’t disagree with most points however, systemd also provides a TON of functionally that was never this easy and stable. Also if you consider the grand scheme of things Docker and whatnot are a bigger virus than systemd is or will ever be and the irony is that systemd does run containers with less overhead :).