Of all the people who have incredibly strong opinions about not-so-incredibly important things, the virulently anti-systemd crowd are among the ones that baffle me the most.
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.
If your favorite thing is being ruined and you can't stop it, I can understand frustration being displayed as anger.
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.
That's the joy of open source though: you can stop it.
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.
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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.
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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.
Richard P. Gabriel, in his essay βThe Rise of Worse-is-Better,β expounds on this theme (see Appendix A). His thesis is that the Unix design philosophy requires that all design decisions err on the side of implementation simplicity, and not on the side of correctness, consistency, or completeness. He calls this the βWorse Is Betterβ philosophy and shows how it yields programs that are technically inferior to programs designed where correctness and consistency are paramount, but that are evolutionarily superior because they port more easily. Just like a virus.
The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command that does precisely one function, and does it well (...) This philosophy, in the hands of amateurs, leads to inexplicably mind-numbing botches like the existence of two programs, βheadβ and βtail,β which print the first part or the last part of a file, depending. Even though their operations are duals of one another, βheadβ and βtailβ are different programs, written by different authors, and take different options!
From The Unix Hater's Handbook
(I like Linux, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows)
That head/tail thing is kind of a goofy argument. For one thing they aren't duals; tail is naturally more complex because the end of a file often changes and the application can optionally keep showing you the new output. Also, the fact that they're separate applications in the first place is arguably better than the a one-application approach, which would always require a command line switch to select between outputting the start or end of a file. And finally, while I guess this could vary between implementations of head and tail, mine has identical switches for all the common options.
They could have been two commands that call a single parent command with different options. For example, imagine if cat had an option -N to restrict the number of lines that was printed, and also an option -t to start from the end. head would just proxy to cat -N and tail would proxy to cat -N -t. Combining the three into a single implementation reduces total LoC and opportunity for bugs. Also reduces total maintenance burden.
I believe busybox is like this actually - a ton of Unix commands in a single package. It's used by Alpine Linux, a tiny and performance linux distro commonly used by docker containers.
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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.
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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?
Systemd changing from text to binary logs is my pet peeve.
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.
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be nice to him, he's baffled
The real problem with systemd is figuring out what's is or isn't part of systemd...
That's easy: If it's a service reasonably expected to be present on most desktop systems, it's part of systemd or will eventually be.
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There's legitimate criticism of systemd and I do understand that people can hate it.
Anyways, systemd is so nice to use. Even more with nixos.
I'm trying to use alpine Linux on a VM. The amount of things depending on systemd is extreme. It's a pain in the ass not having it.
Orr... I'm shitty at Linux.
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It's like that very very old joke...
Geek: "So then I brought the girl home..."
Excited crowd: "and then?"
Geek: "then I pushed the keyboard and sat her on my desk..."
Excited crowd: "woah, you have a PC? What processor do you have? Do you overclock? What cooling do you use?"
at first i read it as greek and was very confused
... and then we had wonderful souvlaki! OPPA!!!
α(α)α
It probably also works, depending on your audience.
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I like systemd because my distro came with it and my computer boots.
Linux users: come join the community! It's free, safe, and accessible!
Also Linux users: you fucking swine? You do WHAT?!
Like just be happy more people are joining the community and contributing. Shesh
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I was genuinely looking for alternatives to systemd, just because I was curious.
I stumbled upon: https://nosystemd.org/
The anger sits deep. What a beautiful sight.
That site is unusable on FF mobile.
It has some craptastic scroll animation thing happening and have disabled the FF reader mode somehow.
Which is a shame, I'd like to have read it :-(
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Yes, I do. And even worse: I like it. π
Gentoo lured me into OpenRC a long time ago and it's just basically my go to now. It's just so easy and "feels" less bloated to me.
I do as well and honestly after looking into the effort required to switch Iβm not gonna. Altho my Linux doesnβt boot rn sooooβ¦ xD
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What are the alternatives to systemd? Why people are hating it (besides the AI slop and age verification stub in it)? Why is it not written in the D programming language?
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