I agree with the user friendliness aspect for sure. But systemd still sucks right now. A few examples; do you use full disk encryption / LUKS ? its passphrase request module is 1. vastly different than the initramfs one, and less secure; 2. given to presenting you the prompt for different volumes in random order; its LUKS closure module screws up about 50% of the time, having to timeout after 1:30 for each volume it failed for.
When I started using Linux in the 90s, something that was extremely common was a minor issue (due to BIOS compatibility IIRC) where Linux wouldn't be able to shut down the computer; it'd end up with a console saying "you can now cut power" - much like Windows 95 at the time. This disappeared more than a decade ago; and yet for the first time in more than 10 years, due to systemd, this is now again the case on 2 out of 3 laptops I own.
Some other issues are due to the automated systemd scripts generations for services that didn't support it natively yet, mind you (uwsgi under debian comes to mind); but a lot aren't. Moreover, systemd means loss of compatibility with legacy hardware, and a lot of embedded stuff; the RAM usage of that thing is awful for a simple init system. It has a lot of feature creep, too; and binary format for logs, while it's a more minor issue, can be a pain in the ass on - again - legacy or exotic systems.
Finally, I'm having a hard time trusting such a new, needlessly complex software at such a critical position in a system security-wise. Feedback on security issues from the dev team on their tracker didn't always inspire confidence, either.
Ultimately I'm sure eventually it'll mostly be OK, of course, just like pulseaudio; and I wholly agree about the easiness of the syntax. But I am absolutely convinced you could've implemented something far far cleaner, simpler, and just as user friendly without all the bullshit on top of it. For me ultimately it's far removed from the unix philosophy: it is over engineered, makes it harder to integrate with other tools, and reminds one more of proprietary software than free software in the way it was designed.
I do use LUKS on my laptop, but not my desktop. I guess I don't encounter those situations because I just use the default encrypted setup the Fedora installer gives me on one hard drive and one volume. Nor have I seen messages from any computer I've used Linux on telling me to shut down the computer because it couldn't handle it itself.
My impression of systemd is very different than yours. I think it's a godsend unifying group of technologies that harmonizes different distros, just as the kernel itself puts everything under the "Linux" umbrella. I can take common unit files, concepts, and ideas and share them from Arch to Debian to Fedora and others as well. Things like binary logs don't trouble me because tooling exists to decode them, just as cat and zcat exist to print text and compressed text files.
You know what's a bit funny to me? I actually just had an experience recently where I was rewriting a docker-compose file as a script to work with podman and for the containers to reside properly in a pod. If you don't know, podman doesn't officially support the compose files, they have more natural support for kubernetes kubes which looks pointlessly complicated... Anyway, so I went from the declarative config file (docker-compose.yml) to my own little handwritten mishmash.sh to create the more podman-centric script and I felt like it was a reverse of my experience of going from sysvinit to systemd.
I agree with the user friendliness aspect for sure. But systemd still sucks right now. A few examples; do you use full disk encryption / LUKS ? its passphrase request module is 1. vastly different than the initramfs one, and less secure; 2. given to presenting you the prompt for different volumes in random order; its LUKS closure module screws up about 50% of the time, having to timeout after 1:30 for each volume it failed for.
When I started using Linux in the 90s, something that was extremely common was a minor issue (due to BIOS compatibility IIRC) where Linux wouldn't be able to shut down the computer; it'd end up with a console saying "you can now cut power" - much like Windows 95 at the time. This disappeared more than a decade ago; and yet for the first time in more than 10 years, due to systemd, this is now again the case on 2 out of 3 laptops I own.
Some other issues are due to the automated systemd scripts generations for services that didn't support it natively yet, mind you (uwsgi under debian comes to mind); but a lot aren't. Moreover, systemd means loss of compatibility with legacy hardware, and a lot of embedded stuff; the RAM usage of that thing is awful for a simple init system. It has a lot of feature creep, too; and binary format for logs, while it's a more minor issue, can be a pain in the ass on - again - legacy or exotic systems.
Finally, I'm having a hard time trusting such a new, needlessly complex software at such a critical position in a system security-wise. Feedback on security issues from the dev team on their tracker didn't always inspire confidence, either.
Ultimately I'm sure eventually it'll mostly be OK, of course, just like pulseaudio; and I wholly agree about the easiness of the syntax. But I am absolutely convinced you could've implemented something far far cleaner, simpler, and just as user friendly without all the bullshit on top of it. For me ultimately it's far removed from the unix philosophy: it is over engineered, makes it harder to integrate with other tools, and reminds one more of proprietary software than free software in the way it was designed.
I do use LUKS on my laptop, but not my desktop. I guess I don't encounter those situations because I just use the default encrypted setup the Fedora installer gives me on one hard drive and one volume. Nor have I seen messages from any computer I've used Linux on telling me to shut down the computer because it couldn't handle it itself.
My impression of systemd is very different than yours. I think it's a godsend unifying group of technologies that harmonizes different distros, just as the kernel itself puts everything under the "Linux" umbrella. I can take common unit files, concepts, and ideas and share them from Arch to Debian to Fedora and others as well. Things like binary logs don't trouble me because tooling exists to decode them, just as cat and zcat exist to print text and compressed text files.
You could move sysvinit files from distro to distro, mostly, too, mind you; that being said perhaps I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in their habits.
True.
You know what's a bit funny to me? I actually just had an experience recently where I was rewriting a docker-compose file as a script to work with podman and for the containers to reside properly in a pod. If you don't know, podman doesn't officially support the compose files, they have more natural support for kubernetes kubes which looks pointlessly complicated... Anyway, so I went from the declarative config file (docker-compose.yml) to my own little handwritten mishmash.sh to create the more podman-centric script and I felt like it was a reverse of my experience of going from sysvinit to systemd.