I have recently been exposed to a lot of stuff against systemd.
I know its an old debate that has inflamed people for a long time, I am not looking into restarting it as I never took a stance into it in the past anyway.
I am myself a almost 30+ years power user of Linux and I have never used systemd much myself since it never fixed any issues I had with the previous approaches, and since I am a good user of Gentoo, always loved the freedom to just keep using OpenRC and din’t ever bother with systemd.
I like the Unix approach and at the same time, if it is not broken don’t fix it, is my basic idea. So my approach to systemd has been not of dislike, rather of I don’t care, I don’t need it. And I never needed it anyway.
After reading trough most of the links below I start to think that maybe my stance could be more than simple technical.
What are other lemmy-ers idea on all this?
I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the Linux Foundation either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.
TLDR: I don’t dislike systemd, I never cared about systemd. Do I need to start caring now due to all this non technical issues?
(The following is a post on the #libreware telegram channel on the 7th/8th of February 2025)
Lennart Poettering intends to replace “sudo” with #systemd’s run0. Here’s a quick PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploiting the fact “systemd-run” (the basis of uid0/run0, the sudo replacer) creates a user owned pty for communication with the new “root” process.
This isn’t the only bug of course, it’s not possible on Linux to read the environment of a root owned process but as systemd creates a service in the system slice, you can query D-BUS and learn sensitive information passed to the process env, such as API keys or other secrets.
https://fixupx.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559
Nitter mirror: https://xcancel.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559
Here are some links about #systemd #alternatives for #Linux in no particular order. Which are your favorite alternatives and distros?
https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/
https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html
https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/
https://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html
https://the-world-after-systemd.ungleich.ch/
https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=120652
https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/
https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom
https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/linux-systemd-exploit.html
https://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/systemd-it-keeps-getting-worse/
https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/why.php
Some more added here too: https://start.me/p/Kg8keE/priv-sec
#systemd #Linux
A lot of man-hours went into engineering it. Very smart people from many distros went over it, kicked its tires and deemed it good enough to replace old SysV. We’ve been through this, if you don’t like it for some reason, use something else.
It’s just software, people, it’s not a frelling religion.
My god. Yes, we’ve been through this. You can’t just replace Systemd on most distros, because to have the alternatives in the repo, they would have to provide a bunch of shims and wrappers or have two different repos entirely. This is why i dislike Systemd, btw.
And before you start with Gentoo; yes, there it works, because it’s source based and Openrc is basically the wrapper.
Did you read my post at all? Maybe I am not clear enough.
I don’t care for systemd, I don’t dislike it I don’t like it. I don’t use it but merely because I never felt the need to use it, or I would have use it.
What people think of the non technical reasons given in the links/post is what I am asking. Is it just FUD or there is a valid base to them?
If you don’t care about systemd, then why post?
Sysvinit is done. It is not graceful at handling dependant services, it was hard to test, and customising a service was painful compared to unit files.
For someone who’s been at Linux for 30 years, you clearly haven’t spent any time fighting with init scripts.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Poettering. His approach lacks any empathy for anyone who’s entrenched in a current system and breaks stuff with his deployment approach.
But run0 solves a LOT of problems with sudo, problems that have always existed. Have you ever tried to deploy a sudoers file in an ecosystem of Linux systems relying on LDAP? Sudo definitely needs fixing.
You provided 15 links.
Are you seriously expecting somebody to walk you through each one?
You’re claiming not to care either way about systemd and yet you’ve provided 15 sources against it and apparently done zero research into why it has been so widely adopted.
Probably it’s too much asking to go trough all of them indeed, it’s lemmy afterall, already most of the comments didnt actually read the entire first post either.
But i think i didnt have to provide “pro-systemd” links as my intent is not to discuss it’s technical goodness (which i do not dispute!) but to understand what is the common idea about the fact that systemd could be a critical part of Linux which is in the hands of IBM and Microsoft and what this means for the linux community overall.
Either nobody cares, or it’s too much complottistic to be real.