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?
  •  monobot   ( @monobot@lemmy.ml ) 
    13•1 year ago

    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.

    Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.

    It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.

    All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.

    While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system… no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.

    I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering’s code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.

    •  argv_minus_one   ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 
      5•1 year ago

      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.