Out of all the Linux init systems out there, which one are you actually daily driving right now and why? Have you tried any others before your current one? What made you stick with it over the rest?
Out of all the Linux init systems out there, which one are you actually daily driving right now and why? Have you tried any others before your current one? What made you stick with it over the rest?
Most distributions use systemd at varying levels of buy-in (Fedora adopts newest systemd components for example). People dislike systemd either for one: Dbus dependency or two: they hate Lennart Poettering (maintainer of systemd) or three (most likely): they’re a chud (culture war).
systemd is an tremendous piece of software that many people don’t take their time to learn. Poettering hosts a blog where he speaks about new features in systemd: https://0pointer.net/blog/
Did you know systemd can be used to escalate privileges instead of using
sudo/doaswithrun0(https://mastodon.social/@daandemeyer/115565105032166177) or that it can statically configure network interfaces/links with systemd-networkd and function simultaneously with NetworkManager? Or that systemd can spawn OS containers via systemd-nspawn that can be used to run services/create software development environments (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd for more info)or four) your last two paragraphs are the exact reason (and in my experience, the most common one). most of those features should not be part of an init system but they are, slowly growing into everything and becoming a dependency into many different programs
i won’t deny that there is an improvement if you are interested in your machine as only an appliance (for example, what is even the init system of android?) since you don’t want to ever care a bit about your base OS
I recommend reading Poettering’s myth-debunking post on common systemd criticisms (https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html). Some of these are even outdated (like the dbus one where current systemd development is focused around building a alternative varlink interface for IPC in addition to dbus).
Most other init systems can achieve service paralleization and other goodies that systemd-init provides but that isn’t the whole point of systemd.
The tagline for systemd is “systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system.” So it’s clearly not concerned with just being an init system and hasn’t been for a long time.
at risk of repeating myself… that is exactly the point
But these components aren’t strictly part of systemd-init. networkd, systemd-boot, resolved, etc are all optional blocks. Its possible to use systemd-init and not buy into other features.
Software does not depend on systemd they depend on features systemd provides (ex: GNOME and KDE simplifying their login/startup sequence by leveraging systemd-userdb)