this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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There are many legitimate complaints. Bundling a bunch of services into a single binary goes completely against Unix philosophy. Systemd changing from text to binary logs is my pet peeve.
Copying how Windows does things isn't necessarily the best.
It's not people disliking it that makes no sense to me; everyone has their opinions.
I just can't imagine having the level of anger displayed by some of the most vocal of the anti-systemd crowd.
If your favorite thing is being ruined and you can't stop it, I can understand frustration being displayed as anger.
It's the same when Windows users get angry at things like OneDrive. It's forced on them and they don't want to have to work around removing it like people having to work around how Gnome is integrated into systemd.
That's the joy of open source though: you can stop it. You are free to use another init system, fork projects, etc. With Windows, you can't do any of that. Since it's closed source, workarounds that may be temporary are all you can do.
Not really. Unless you are prepared to devote your life to changing the source code to what you want, you have to accept it. And because you forked you are no longer downstream and will have to spend the rest of your life keeping up with patches.
It's not much different than Windows. You could write a OneDrive uninstaller but you will have to spend the rest of your life with patches every time MS updates and breaks your uninstaller.
I mean we are literally on a couple of open source solutions communicating using an open protocol probably using some sort of open OS.
https://nosystemd.org/ is a thing. I dont have particularly strong opinions on the matter.
You don't need to do it alone. In fact, people can come by, fix some things, then go about life. Or donate money instead of resources. If you have used lemmy/piefed/mastodon/peertube in the past, theres a tiny bit of my code in there that makes things just a tiny bit better. Thats not a brag or anything, its just that multiple people can contribute.
But I hear the frustrations. There is a certain mindset you have to have, hopeful you and others can build something....or with enough hatred to build out of spite. Sometimes thats hard to do with everything else in life. Sometimes the best thing to do is to accept and move on. Or go looking for new solutions without maintenance.
If you like a distro and they switch to systemd, there's not a lot you can do if you aren't up to forking the whole distro. I feel like too many people in open source forget that most people have lives outside of Linux.
That and a big company looking to manufacture a perceived advantage by aggreasively pushing their shit into the mainstream - good fit to be taken over by IBM - who can bankroll the slapdash dev and bully ISVs, and you're set.
Hardly a 'favourite thing'; it's like making a water slide out of a river : Wantonly wrecking something simple, effective and usable for this mishmash isn't ruining something sacred as much as it is destroying something for no reason to dramatically create something lesser the world didn't need. Except with more hype, payola, ageism, strong-arm adoption and cult worship.
You know it's not a single binary, right ? Systemd is a bunch of different, mostly single usage, mostly optional, binaries. As far as Unix philosophy goes, Systemd is definitely following the principles, which is not the case for the Kernel for instance.
As for the binary logs, I used to hate it, but then, not having to manually parse logs for filtering is really nice.
I do have my issues with Systemd, but it not following the Unix philosophy is not one of them.
From The Unix Hater's Handbook
(I like Linux, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows)
"This program sucks because it doesn't come with the world's most confusing GUI and doesn't do a trillion things"
If you ask this person what "technically inferior" actually means you'd probably get a different answer every day.
GUI certainly has its place.
Yes and so do simple CLI tools that work. Head and Tail are about the worst examples because they work very well and also do very different things.
But that's not what either of the guys complained about
Yea what a hot take that was, critiquing words that were never there and then calling the person an idiot.
The head and tail programs also do completely different things. What differences in options do they have?
Really completely different? Do they not print first / last lines of text from a file into the terminal?
There's also a few cases of feature and scope creep, including the infamous
systemd-resolved.Systemd, your job is to launch services, manage logs, and do timers and relaunches on a service crash. DNS is out of scope, leave that to existing services.
You've misunderstood something.
systemd-resolved is one of the services that uses systemd's service management system
You're saying "don't use this service management system to manage your services"
I may have written that in a confusing way. I'm saying systemd's job is service management. Systemd-resolved is an unnecessary bit of scope creep.
systemd-resolved is a service. It's not scope-creep. It's its own thing built in the systemd framework.
resolved is entirely optional and disabled by default, I use it on case of non-mobile devices but leave it on laptops etc.
DNS resolution isn't something exotic, it makes sense for systemd to implement it in a simple optional daemon
I agree, though my biggest headache has been with systemd handling mounts. You have to modify a ton of units to add
AfterandRequiredto make sure the NFS shares you have in fstab get mounted before starting services that depend on them. And then if the package maintainer updates their unit files, all your changes disappear!Such a huge headache compared to the classic init.d that mounted everything very early -- with just the occasional "boot delayed a couple seconds because your share was offline" or such.
You're not supposed to modify shipped unit files, that's why systemd supports drop in snippets
I was annoyed with binary logs until I found cases where compressing logs was literally 10x or more improvement, like if you ran into a bug that just repeatedly spit the same log.
And I know logrotate compresses text logs too but if you're going to compress logs into tar.gz, might as well just make it binary by default and have a nice interface (journald) on top
A single binary? What?
Fast searchable compressed files is a fantastic idea.
The other day on a thread here about "people who use other init systems, why?" and i wrote about my experience with systemd and git downvoted for mysterious reasons. Other people that did the same as me also got their downvote sixpacks. And now they want to make it seem like it's just the people that hate systemd the annoying ones...
There are too many people who use downvote to disagree with cogent and well written points.
I try to only downvote if something is obviously trolling, in bad taste, or wildly stupid.
Downvoting is a legitimate tool of expressing your disagreement.
Maybe the people who downvoted didn't think the points were cogent or well-written.
Hey, just wanted to let you know that I downvoted your comment. Mainly because I think it's funny when people can't come up with compelling arguments and complain about being downvoted instead, but also because I'm part of the conspiracy making sure that people vocally complaining about systemd seem really annoying and wrong.
It attracts a lot of silent disagreement that's for sure.
By far my most controversial post was negative about systemd, while posts on Palestine, anarchy, etc. received no negative attention at all.
Well, perhaps Palestine is not controversial at all?
Lemmy is just highly opinionated, poor social skills, and often closed minded.
be nice to him, he's baffled
What systemd binary is the worst offender, in your opinion?
Logind. Right after udev.
Not sure whatβs annoying about logind, but udev was introduced eight years before systemd was a thing.
It's not the binary. It's that the logs it writes are in binary so can't be read without a program.
Even systems that use text logs, compress logs using logrotate and you have to uncompress before you can read them. Also since the compressed tar.gz logs are a bunch of separate files, if you don't have an exact date of what you're looking for, you have to uncompress and search through all of them. I much prefer just using journalctl
I mean... zless and zgrep have been a thing since forever ago. And some distros ship with lessopen(?) preinstalled, so it's seemless.
There are only so many times I'm willing to put up with lost logfile due to a crash. Logrotate wouldn't do this.
But then you aren't just using a text editor anymore. If you're willing to use programs like zless and zgrep, then you can just as easily use journalctl. And I've never lost a logfile before, over many years, so not to discredit your experience but at least in my experience journald has been an upgrade
Why would I ever use a text editor? I think our approaches to viewing logs are fundamentally different.
Well the original comment I responded to said
Of course, a text editor is also a "program", but I assumed they were saying they preferred plain text logs.
If you aren't agreeing with them then you need to state your position more clearly when you hop in.
You can read systemd logs with
stringsprogram (part of binutils). Even if the file itself corrupted due to a crash.You can't read a text file without a program either.