What is systemd and why is it hated?
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From what i’ve experienced, systemd hatred can be summarized by 3 major things:
1 – Systemd makes itself into a dependency of other applications or makes other applications need to alter their behaviours to account for it. For example if you want to run a Windows virtual machine on your PC then you are expected to register it with systemd as a virtual machine. … Why? Well, as others have pointed out failure to do so may result in systemd killing your virtual machine under certain situations. This means the software making virtual machines needs to be systemd-aware now and register the Windows VM, partially to protect it from such actions. If it was not, your VM might be terminated and the response from systemd authors would be that your VM software needs to talk to systemd.
2 – Hinted at in my first item, the lead developer(s) have not been very well received by the greater community. There was a rather famous situation a number of years back where someone’s logs from systemd’s log collector were damaged and unreadable. The response was to just delete them and move on. The advice to just delete your logs is not a good one for a system administrator. Logs tell you what’s going on and help your find problems. The notion that you should just throw them away is a sour one.
3 – There have been a large number of concerns with the code quality. Many security issues have been found in systemd over the years. Systemd runs as process #1 on Linux meaning it has full administrative privileges and if it crashes then the whole system crashes with it, effectively a bluescreen of death. Consequently the traditional philosophy is that the program in this position should be as simple and dumb as possible. systemd turns that on its head making it into a service manager, login session tracker, and all sorts of other things allowing non-administrative users to send it messages. Personally I can say that on servers with a lot of logged messages going on it’s the systemd log service that’s the bottleneck… even if it just forwards the messages all to another application. But I can’t get rid of it so easily and I’m stuck with the bottleneck.
Now systemd does bring a lot of good things with it. Linux has lacked a well received general purpose service manager in its life which systemd provides. From my personal standpoint though, that is the *only* redeeming quality I have found with it and that doesn’t nearly offset the bad stuff that comes with it instead. Given the choice I would not use it.
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