SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.
I’m old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don’t see that as an issue anymore. I don’t have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).
My 2 questions:
- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
sshd’s init script under OpenRC is 87 lines, of which around half are blanks, comments, closing braces, and other boilerplate. Granted, that still makes the real code maybe three times the size of your systemd unit file, but the difference isn’t as impressive as you’re making out.
95% of people shouldn’t need to poke around in their init scripts or unit files anyway. If you actually need to do that, your use case is already somewhat unusual.
As an end user, unless you’re running a server, then no you shouldn’t have to mess with any of it.
If you’re running a server or a sysadmin you absolutely 100% should be paying attention. Almost every single vendor I’ve seen selling their applications only have initscripts. Which then cause issues. I’ve gone to the vendors and told them and they’ve said go to Red Hat. Well Red Hat doesn’t support that vendor’s init scripts.
Not naming an application, but it was from a BIG BLUE company and they said their only instructions are to call their script from the user. But it won’t remain running if you do that because systemd will close out the slice when the user logs out. SO it’s obvious they haven’t tried what they’re suggesting.
And I’m not attempting to state that systemd is impressive in any way. systemd basically took what had been building over 40 years of init scripting and threw it out the window and said our way is better. I don’t think it is. I’m just saying, with a directive based unit file it’ll be simpler to parse than a bash script.