BSDCan
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2018–2024
32:30 · 25K views · Aug 6, 2018
Benno Rice's BSDCan 2018 talk on why systemd exists and what it got right and wrong. It traces the history of Unix init and why Linux distributions adopted it, while asking what the BSDs should learn.
HN recommends it as a balanced, eloquent take on the systemd debate that even skeptics find persuasive.
5 comments from Hacker News
>Personally, I never found startup time to be much of a problem, on any OS. Well, start up problem is a matter of convenience, it's not a fatal problem, but I just like that my laptop with arch+systemd+systemd-boot starts instantly (3 seconds + 6 seconds for firmware), while bsd on my other laptop starts soo damn slow. (btw slow shutdown pisses me off even more) Though the real issues with rc are much more serious, and eloquently described here (aka you don't have proper login management, service management, device and policy management, and better in a unified way): this video
One of the better videos on this subject: this video BSDCan 2018—Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd "systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. Depending on who you ask it's either a complete violation of the UNIX philosophy, a bloated pile of bugs, a complete violation of the elegant simplicity it replaced or, it most cases, some or all of the above. So why have so many Linux distributions taken to it? Is it as bad as people say?
A nice talk that might change your view of the subject is the following: this video . It's a video from BSDCan, the Canadian BSD conference. Even some BSD people are realizing that systemd has a good point to exist!
> After listening to the BSD Canada talk on systemd and BSD For someone who don't know, here is the video "The tragedy of systemd". This is a really good talk. this video
> Tacitly: most people don’t like launchd, but they don’t interact with it either. Find me a person who writes or debugs launchd plists and you’ll find that: > [...] > 2. they don’t like launchd This is true in my case, although the main thing on my mind when I work with launchd my main complaint often boils down to 'I wish this were more like systemd'. IME, systemd has much nicer CLIs, more capabilities, clearer and more comprehensive documentation, more abundant examples, and more conveniences/less privileges required for per-user stuff. The simple INI format for systemd units is also a lot easier and nicer to deal with than the XML format that plists use, even though there's a lot of tooling around plists. > even if it weren’t there is a built in backup/restore system that literally restores the machine to its entire previous state. I get this for free on NixOS and it's really easy to get on other distros by plugging /etc/systemd into etckeeper, even without a snapshotting filesystem. (Plus many distros have backups via snapshots of CoW filesystems built in just like macOS does.) > launchd and systemd aren’t even comparable, one is part of a monolithic proprietary operating system and the other is an ecosystem that is semi-modular which lends itself strongly to being an entire layer of your computing experience (dubbed: “the system layer” by Lennart Poettering). Benno says literally all of this in his talk. He even has a diagram with the phrase 'system layer' up on a slide