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:
- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
Boot speed was the original selling point :-) after decades of using Linux and avoiding systemd (Slackware) I tried my first systemd a year and a half ago or so. It’s unobtrusive but my needs are basic right now. It has been so widely adopted now that arguing about it is basically pointless.
On the other hand we shouldn’t forget it’s basic flaw: it violates the fundamental principles of Linux. By which I mean write programs that do one thing and do them really well, KISS, maintain POSIX compliance, etc. If systemd was only an init system it would be really awesome. But bit by bit it absorbed functionality and now is a behemoth that runs all of this under a single PID unless that’s changed. And PID1 to boot (pun intended).
Tbh it’s been a long time since I stopped worrying or even thinking about it since it’s kind of like complaining about the weather at this point, it having been so quickly and widely adopted. If they have somehow addressed the design flaw I pointed out above I’d love to know.