this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Is Systemd that bad afterall? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Nuuskis@sopuli.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.

I'm old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don't see that as an issue anymore. I don't have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).

My 2 questions:

  1. Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they've improved a lot)?
  2. Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
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[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don’t know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.

Poettering is like Torvalds: gruff when pressed, but not wrong.

PulseAudio is like systemd: dramatically better than what came before, and the subject of a great deal of criticism with no apparent basis in reality.

PulseAudio did expose a lot of ALSA driver bugs early on. That may be the reason for its bad rap. But it's still quite undeserved.

Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.

This is a nonsensical argument. Systemd is FOSS. It can and will be forked if that becomes necessary.

Which, in light of recent changes at Red Hat, seems likely to happen soon…

Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting.

That's because fragmentation among fundamental components like sound servers and process supervisors results in a compatibility nightmare. You really want to go back to the bad old days when video games had to support four different sound servers and the user had to select one with an environment variable? Good riddance to that.

I want solutions to come from community and nice people

Then you'd best pack your bags and move to something other than Linux, because Linus Torvalds is infamous for his scathing (albeit almost invariably correct) rants.

[–] monobot@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Poettering is like Torvalds

Lol, not even close. I am not talking about being harsh for writing stupid code. Nor I want to go 20 years back to proove it to some random person, do it yourself.

Systemd is FOSS. It can and will be forked if

Yeah, the same way chrome can be forked. No, software developed like that - in closed room just source being dropped on to community, what happened with PA and SD in the begging no one wants to touch. Gentoo had big problems just maintaing eudev and elogind to enable gnome and some other software to work.

Luckily, it is not important anymore, there is pipewire so I managed to skeep PA completely.

[–] thanhdo@fosstodon.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@argv_minus_one @monobot Pulse Audio is good for a desktop multi-program environment. Its optimized for context switching, however for MIDI applications it has too much latency and you need to use Jack.

[–] user8e8f87c@berlin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@thanhdo @argv_minus_one @monobot What about Pipewire? Doesn’t that combine Pulseaudio und Jack capabilities?

[–] daemonspudguy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

PipeWire is a whole other audio manager that happens to be compatible with PulseAudio and JACK.