this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
-78 points (21.7% liked)
Linux
48310 readers
645 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So what? Linux Kernel has an even larger attack surface, the size of the attack surface is a moot point without examples of attacks being made
Yes, systemd modules depend on systemd, that's like complaining that a GUI application depends on X.
It doesn't, that's ridiculous, several distros don't use systemd and still have udev
If your laptop doesn't run Linux it will not run BSD since BSD has less hardware compatibility than Linux. Also BSD is a different system, you'll need to relearn a lot of things, how to enable services is just one of them, and a pretty small one at that. And Finally there are forks of systemd that work on BSD, the reason it's not used there is not technical.
Again, more attack surface does not mean anything, to add to that example most people use the precompiled kernel that comes with their distro instead of compiling a leaner one to diminish attack surface, because that's irrelevant. You could have said let's your system bloated which would be a somewhat valid point, the answer being if the person cared they would uninstall one of the alternatives, but you chose the most insignificant aspect of this, if there's a vulnerability in your computer it's 99.99999% coming from whatever you exposed in that computer, e.g. SSH, Nextcloud, etc, chances of an attack coming through systemd are so ridiculously small it's not even worth mentioning, and if ever someone discovers an escalation privilege or something similar on systemd the fact that everyone uses it will make the fix available in 24h on most major distros.
There are reasons to hate on systemd, but you didn't provided a single valid one.
SystemD is not modular. Logind is just an executable that depends on systemD libs. Red Hat could design it to be init-agnostic(similar to elogind). But they didn't. Any assumptions, why?
Yes module is not the correct word, but that's nitpicking, the concept is still the same, it's a binary that depends on systemd, that's a developer choice, same as using GTK or Qt, there are up and downsides to choose what your program depends on, the developers of systemd-logind decided to depend on systemd knowing the downsides, and distros decide to use it also knowing of them. As for your question possibly the answer is that the added difficulties of making it system agnostic did not compensated for the low user base, same reason most games don't have a native binary.
Looks like Red Hat makes everything they can systemd-dependent. Including Gnome.