Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has posted on Mastodon about their upcoming v256 release of Systemd, which is expected to include a sudo replacem...
This will probably lead to vocal outrage because it’s Systemd rather than an alternative project coming up with the solution.
Sudo has long known to have dangerous weaknesses, but it’s generally been accepted since sudo solves a bunch of other problems.
If we can fix the problems sudo has, then that’s a good thing. Would be nicer if we could split up some of these projects though to stop uber projects.
The outrage is that the solution is to suck the feature into an already massive project built to replace initd and has absorbed several other services (syslog, logind, crond), creating dependencies along the way.
systemd will be superceded, like pulseaudio, because it has an awful design. It’ll just be a lot more work for distros to replace because of all the other services it’s absorbed. Hopefully by then Poettering will have retired and stopped inflicting his software in people. The problem isn’t his initial offerings; those are rather good and solve a problem well. Good enough that distros adopt it. It’s just that he can’t resist feature envy and bloat, and once a distro has a dependency on his solution, the bloat comes along and it’s more work to switch away than just let the bloat take over.
Edit: “superseded?” Where were you when I needed you, autocorrect?
The reason systemd absorbs other services is because it’s trying to make a proper integrated OS userland. Having a load of separate components that don’t really know anything about each other kiiind of works, but it’s super janky.
For example Windows has supported a secure attention key sequence (ctrl-alt-del) for literal decades. Linux still doesn’t support this very basic - and critical for shared computing environments like schools - feature, because it requires coordinating X11 and logind and the kernel and god knows what else and they simply aren’t properly integrated.
The systemd hatred strongly reminds me of when Xorg started automating the config and you no longer needed xfree86config. You didn’t need to manually write mode lines and tell X that your mouse had 3 buttons, and some people did not like that.
Yes it sounds completely insane that people wouldn’t like this obvious improvement where things used to require tedious manual configuration and now they worked automatically but some people really didn’t I promise! My theory is that it’s because a) it made their hard won knowledge obsolete, making them less smart relatively, and b) they resented the fact that they had to go through the pain but new people wouldn’t and that isn’t fair.
Seems similar with systemd. I would like my laptop to sleep properly please.
Also I have actually read some of the sudo source code. There’s absolutely no way that code should be SUID. Insane.
I can see an argument that Poettering is a net good because he does something, and it’s usually pretty decent to start. Then after it’s been widely adopted, some weird software megalomania takes over and it swells into a bloated carcass until someone is motivated enough to build a better, more focused, replacement.
systemd is a distro builder’s dream: all you need is that and a kernel, and you’ve got most of the non-userspace, so you throw GNU on top and you’re free to do what you really wanted to focus on: a new package manager, or a specific desktop environment, bells-and-whistles.
I really hate journald. Like, with enough passion I’m slowly converting all my systems away from systemd, just to get rid of it. It’s slow and buggy, and the fact that I can’t swap it out for something else is the reason I’m anti-systemd. Which is an excellent initd replacement, IMO, and if that were all it was I’d be a fan-boi. But journald stinks, for all the reasons you point out, and more.
As far as I remember Poettering worked for IBM’s RedHat for some time and then the systemd lobbying vibe became stronger (with Fedora being the RedHat toy). Nowadays Poettering works for Microsoft, btw.
Because the software he writes starts out good, and solves problems. systemd is a really nice initd replacement. Pulseaudio really improved audio on Linux. Distros adopted them because they were good.
The problem is feature creep, exactly like the OP post. For some reason, Poettering’s projects can’t contain themselves to a problem space. Converting init systems is a lot of work, and even if Debian had recognized the feature-creep of systemd as undesirable, there was no way they were going through all of the pain and suffering of another migration. Plus, there isn’t yet a clear successor to systemd. My money is on dinit; s6 is simply too complex, and has too many commands to remember. But the point is, systemd was an excellent initd replacement, and there was a lot of adoption when that’s all it was. And as it grew, distros were already committed and stuck with it (although, journald was there from the beginning, and that should have sounded warning bells).
As far as I remember Poettering worked for IBM’s RedHat for some time and then the systemd lobbying vibe became stronger (with Fedora being the RedHat toy). Nowadays Poettering works for Microsoft, btw.
mesa and linux is also “uber projects” i think in certains canes you can’t run away from them, systemd is the same, but for privilegiated processes that need to be well integrated for security reasons
While I agree that sometimes Uber projects happen, for efficiency or security reasons, I don’t think that Mesa is a good example as they have a scope (implement the OpenGL/Vulkan API) and stick to it.
Systemd is already confusing because of it referencing two different projects, and the overarching systemd projects scope just increases on a regular basis without what appears to external observers as a plan.
Is journald still binary? That alone made me turn away.
Yes, unreadable with a text editor. Meaning that if you have a computer problem and journald or systemd is broken you have can’t consult the log files, unless you did install rsyslog or sometimes before that. Meanwhile by default journald will eat a few GBs of disk space soon.
Storage efficiency, faster queries, more metadata, unified format, etc. If your host breaks, you can download the journals and open then elsewhere. Also, there is nothing stopping you from configuring it to output to a file.
“on nooo i’m gonna stop using what make modern linux OS good just because they save logs in binary, istead of binary w ith .txt 😭😭” go ahead them, make your life worse
“on nooo i’m gonna stop using what make modern linux OS good just because they save logs in binary, istead of binary w ith .txt 😭😭” go ahead them, make your life worse
😒
One can keep on using systemd and complain about journald and install rsyslogd and then you’d have the journalctl -f command to impress your Linux noob friends ;-) and /var/log/syslog when there’s trouble when journald would be dead.
if you can’t access journald you have a bigger problem than crying about it’s binary file format, but ok keep needing to parse every fucking log using grep and taking 30 second to find anything meaningful if you hate yourself that much
This will probably lead to vocal outrage because it’s Systemd rather than an alternative project coming up with the solution.
Sudo has long known to have dangerous weaknesses, but it’s generally been accepted since sudo solves a bunch of other problems. If we can fix the problems sudo has, then that’s a good thing. Would be nicer if we could split up some of these projects though to stop uber projects.
The outrage is that the solution is to suck the feature into an already massive project built to replace initd and has absorbed several other services (syslog, logind, crond), creating dependencies along the way.
systemd will be superceded, like pulseaudio, because it has an awful design. It’ll just be a lot more work for distros to replace because of all the other services it’s absorbed. Hopefully by then Poettering will have retired and stopped inflicting his software in people. The problem isn’t his initial offerings; those are rather good and solve a problem well. Good enough that distros adopt it. It’s just that he can’t resist feature envy and bloat, and once a distro has a dependency on his solution, the bloat comes along and it’s more work to switch away than just let the bloat take over.
Edit: “superseded?” Where were you when I needed you, autocorrect?
The reason systemd absorbs other services is because it’s trying to make a proper integrated OS userland. Having a load of separate components that don’t really know anything about each other kiiind of works, but it’s super janky.
For example Windows has supported a secure attention key sequence (ctrl-alt-del) for literal decades. Linux still doesn’t support this very basic - and critical for shared computing environments like schools - feature, because it requires coordinating X11 and logind and the kernel and god knows what else and they simply aren’t properly integrated.
The systemd hatred strongly reminds me of when Xorg started automating the config and you no longer needed xfree86config. You didn’t need to manually write mode lines and tell X that your mouse had 3 buttons, and some people did not like that.
Yes it sounds completely insane that people wouldn’t like this obvious improvement where things used to require tedious manual configuration and now they worked automatically but some people really didn’t I promise! My theory is that it’s because a) it made their hard won knowledge obsolete, making them less smart relatively, and b) they resented the fact that they had to go through the pain but new people wouldn’t and that isn’t fair.
Seems similar with systemd. I would like my laptop to sleep properly please.
Also I have actually read some of the sudo source code. There’s absolutely no way that code should be SUID. Insane.
wake me up when this happen lol
A few years ago, you’d have said the same thing about pulseaudio.
pulseaudio was always shit LMAO, the same about the stupid bash scripts used for init before systemd
pipewire?
Yah.
Yep, completely agree. That was essentially the last line of my comment.
I also wish that journald had a spec for its database, or standardised on something like Sqlite which could be interrogated with generic tooling.
Agree, and I think I understood what you meant.
I can see an argument that Poettering is a net good because he does something, and it’s usually pretty decent to start. Then after it’s been widely adopted, some weird software megalomania takes over and it swells into a bloated carcass until someone is motivated enough to build a better, more focused, replacement.
systemd is a distro builder’s dream: all you need is that and a kernel, and you’ve got most of the non-userspace, so you throw GNU on top and you’re free to do what you really wanted to focus on: a new package manager, or a specific desktop environment, bells-and-whistles.
I really hate journald. Like, with enough passion I’m slowly converting all my systems away from systemd, just to get rid of it. It’s slow and buggy, and the fact that I can’t swap it out for something else is the reason I’m anti-systemd. Which is an excellent initd replacement, IMO, and if that were all it was I’d be a fan-boi. But journald stinks, for all the reasons you point out, and more.
How did he get so much influence over most mainstream distros? Asking for a friend…
he never, distros adopted systemd because it works, no one forced them, end of the history
No, that’s too rational. What leverage does he have on all of these distro maintainers? Someone needs to get to the bottom of this! /s
lmao found one answer exactly like that
Because the software he writes starts out good, and solves problems. systemd is a really nice initd replacement. Pulseaudio really improved audio on Linux. Distros adopted them because they were good.
The problem is feature creep, exactly like the OP post. For some reason, Poettering’s projects can’t contain themselves to a problem space. Converting init systems is a lot of work, and even if Debian had recognized the feature-creep of systemd as undesirable, there was no way they were going through all of the pain and suffering of another migration. Plus, there isn’t yet a clear successor to systemd. My money is on dinit; s6 is simply too complex, and has too many commands to remember. But the point is, systemd was an excellent initd replacement, and there was a lot of adoption when that’s all it was. And as it grew, distros were already committed and stuck with it (although, journald was there from the beginning, and that should have sounded warning bells).
don’t use the features, lol “nooo how dare them put new optionals features 😭😭”
As far as I remember Poettering worked for IBM’s RedHat for some time and then the systemd lobbying vibe became stronger (with Fedora being the RedHat toy). Nowadays Poettering works for Microsoft, btw.
mesa and linux is also “uber projects” i think in certains canes you can’t run away from them, systemd is the same, but for privilegiated processes that need to be well integrated for security reasons
While I agree that sometimes Uber projects happen, for efficiency or security reasons, I don’t think that Mesa is a good example as they have a scope (implement the OpenGL/Vulkan API) and stick to it.
Systemd is already confusing because of it referencing two different projects, and the overarching systemd projects scope just increases on a regular basis without what appears to external observers as a plan.
Is journald still binary? That alone made me turn away. I am using PCLinuxOS hence am systemd free. Stopped reading up on it.
Yes, unreadable with a text editor. Meaning that if you have a computer problem and journald or systemd is broken you have can’t consult the log files, unless you did install rsyslog or sometimes before that. Meanwhile by default journald will eat a few GBs of disk space soon.
Compared to this what is the advantage of binary form? I thought log files being text was a no brainer.
Storage efficiency, faster queries, more metadata, unified format, etc. If your host breaks, you can download the journals and open then elsewhere. Also, there is nothing stopping you from configuring it to output to a file.
Open them elsewhere is also true for text files I guess.
“on nooo i’m gonna stop using what make modern linux OS good just because they save logs in binary, istead of binary w ith .txt 😭😭” go ahead them, make your life worse
😒
One can keep on using systemd and complain about journald and install rsyslogd and then you’d have the
journalctl -fcommand to impress your Linux noob friends ;-) and /var/log/syslog when there’s trouble when journald would be dead.if you can’t access journald you have a bigger problem than crying about it’s binary file format, but ok keep needing to parse every fucking log using grep and taking 30 second to find anything meaningful if you hate yourself that much
systemd is a group of projects, they can create as much projects inside the name systemd tho
I just want Sudo registered to a hardware key. No sudo for you unless you plug in your key.
Let’s get back to the old hacker movies where burglary was involved.