Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Wols Lists <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 12/12/17 18:55, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> You seem to know systemd reasonably well - maybe you've got it
> installed and you're using it.  Please tell me whether my suspicion
> above (that systemd builds stuff into the system that is likely to be
> superfluous to a user, and possibly forces its use on its users) is well
> founded.

If you want to "check things out", it's a lot easier to check out an
*init system built on systemd* than one built on SysVInit. Dunno about
OpenRC.

Yes, systemd itself is a lot bigger than init itself. Yes, systemd plus
service files is smaller (MUCH smaller) than the equivalent init plus
scripts.

The other big "problem" that many people moan about is that systemd
takes over things like system time, system name, cron, etc etc etc. But
having dealt with a whole variety of linux and unix systems, it's nice
to know that systemd has standardised where the host name is stored.
It's nice to know that how to set system time is standard across
distros. Cron? Well the whole point of systemd is to start services as
required, and cron merely starts services as required where "as
required" is defined by time, so why not merge the two?

The big problem, as I see it, with systemd is that if the boot fails for
any reason it dumps you into a rescue shell. I prefer the old behaviour
of dumping you into a running system with broken services. But given the
choice I'd much rather have neither! :-)

On my SuSE (systemd) laptop, I have a bunch of problems, of which
systemd is minor. The network won't resume properly after suspend
(nothing to do with systemd afaict), the video driver is broken and I
suspect that is what drives system load over 6 (on a dual-core system)
so response time is measured in minutes. The screen itself stops working
at random. All that I suspect is down to a broken i915 or whatever it is
Intel driver (which has a bad rep in the kernel - a nightmare seeing as
it seems to be the default Intel laptop video setup :-( etc etc.

The two big problems I really can lay at systemd's feet is that the boot
occasionally fails and says "dumping you into plymouth console" but
doesn't - this goes away with a reboot ... hey reboots aren't supposed
to fix problems in linux!, and Windows has this infuriating habit of
ignoring my command to shutdown, instead suspending to disk. As my
Windows partitions automount in linux, this causes the mount to fail,
and systemd won't boot the system. So I spend/waste half an hour trying
to force Windows to shut down properly!

Cheers,
Wol