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[–] [S] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I've gotten into quite a lot of systemd-related flame wars so far, and what strikes me is that I haven't heard a single reason why systemd is good and should be used in favor of openrc/sysvinit/whatever. The only arguments I hear in favor of systemd, even from the its diehard defenders, are justifications why it's not that bad. Not once have I heard someone advocate for systemd with reasoning that goes likes "Systemd is superior to legacy init systems because you can do X much easier" or "systemd is more secure because it's resistant against Y attack vector". It's always "Linus says it's allright" or "binary logfiles aren't a problem, you can just get them from journald instead of reading the file", or "everyone already uses it".

When it comes to online discourse, systemd doesn't have advocates, it has apologists.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Well, I'll tell you that I prefer systemd because I can comprehend its declarative unit files and dependency-based system a lot better than the shell script DSLs and runlevels that I've had to mess with in other init systems. systemctl status has a quite nice output that can be really handy when debugging units. I like being able to pull up logs for just about any service on my system with a simple journalctl command instead of researching where the log file is.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago

    Thank you for the detailed response, very informative. You make a really good point about centralized logging, I can see how that can be very helpful when you run A LOT of different server process on one machine. I get centralized logging as a bonus of running everything in Docker, but I can see how it is nice to have logging as part of the init system if you want to run a lot of services natively.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    I’ve gotten into quite a lot of systemd-related flame wars so far, and what strikes me is that I haven’t heard a single reason why systemd is good and should be used in favor of openrc/sysvinit/whatever.

    "Hi I'm new to Linux, I switched from Windows to Alpine Linux and my laptop's battery life has gone from 6 hours to 30 minutes before needing a charge."

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