this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Linux
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I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn't make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.
Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.
I’ll just go ahead and start the flame war.
I totally agree with the functionality of systemd. We need that. But the implementation… Why the fuck do we need to cram everything into pid 1? At least delegate the parsing into another process, god damn. And could we all just agree that ’systemd-{networkd,resolved,homed}’ don’t really have a reason to exist, and definitely not that coupled to a fucking init system. Systemd-timers are wonderful, but why are we running cron-but-better in pid 1?
We have an init-system where the developers are afraid of using things like processes and separation of privileges. I’m just tired of patching fleets of servers in panic every time Pöttering’s bad design decisions hit the fan with their CVEs and consequences.
The coupling in PID 1 is a bit much. I actually quite like
systemd-networkdfor some use cases, though. It lets me declaratively manage the network interfaces on my headless servers in a way that's very similar to how I'm managing the services. Sure, it's coupled tosystemd, but it's mostly one-way coupling; if I want to use NetworkManager (which I do on my laptop), I can switch over, and nothing in the init system breaks.