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?
runuser I do know and you’re correct it’s what is expected, and actually you CAN use su you just have to make sure you use the arguement that tells it not to follow a login process, but as a syaadmin myself, none of the guys I worked with, and none of the customers I had ever worked with hitting these issues had ever heard of it. But yes you can switch user without falling through the PAM stack and be fine.
As for the fork maybe they resolved that or maybe they made it better because you only have 1 child, but I can tell you I wouldn’t trust systemd that way personally from my experience. And yes Type=forking also says you should have a PIDFile and that’s in case there are multiple forks you can be explicit in which pid is thr parent. There are other issues you can get into like not setting ulimits or if you have 1 script that starts multiple daemons.