@SteveBellovin but one cannot deny the role systemd played in streamlining and securing the whole thing.

For applications it is hell to implement every specific flavor for all distros. Instead, you either target something widely used (systemd, no matter if we like it or not) or you do some custom stuff (e.g. put everything in ~ ...) and annoy your users.

and aren't the specialized tools closer to the philosophy of "one tool for one job"?

@SteveBellovin @mms correct on all points. every single claim that systemd proponents make to its benefit is already an existing tool or command or method which has existed in Unix and BSDs (and to a lesser extent in pre-systemd Linux distros).

having been professionally involved with all of the major non-windows OS's for over a decade longer than systemd has existed, I can assuredly say that far too many of those claims exist simply due to the claimants vast inexperience with operating system design and engineering. they don't even know, and seemingly don't care, that we never needed systemd, and the vast majority never wanted it.

it's no coincidence that systemd was forced into the Linux communities at the same time that MSFT stopped trying to crush it from beyond -- instead that was the very same era in which they began their assaults on open source via "embrace extend extinguish".

@SteveBellovin I agree that including a pager is stupid and annoying—in bad taste indeed. And there’s lots of systemd scope creep that I abhor.

But syslog style logs suck. And you can tell this because everybody who does mass log retention stores the logs in fields in some sort of database schema—weeping tears of blood throughout the process as they try and deal with what is largely a free text log format. grep/awk can handle matching specific fields in specific types of log messages, but beyond time/date, hostname, and SOMETIMES process name things get real weird. Is there a PID? Is it in square brackets or something else? And beyond that, here be dragons. And systemd logs carry much more useful/searchable log metadata.

Search by date in syslog logs? Hahaha. Do you remember the classic syslog date format? Months are text abbreviations rather than numeric and there’s not even a year in there. Also I’m sure one second granularity was great in the days of one MIP machines. Not so much today.

I suspect the multiple output formats in journalctl is actually there as a backwards compatibility mechanism. I’d be happy if journalctl only produced JSON output because I know how to use jq. The text output modes are there for the awk/sed/grep crowd.

Frankly it is a defect in Unix-like operating systems that command output is free-form text. Life would be better if all Unix/Linux commands at least had the option to emit JSON or some structured output format. Instead we’ve gotten used to using awk/sed/grep, but that doesn’t mean that’s a good thing.

@SteveBellovin The Steve Jobs quote is spot on. The Linux 'user land' developers do not want "Unix" architecture for free they want "Windows" architecture for free. They learned to program on windows, they grew up using windows, they "get" windows, they "want" windows but without the gatekeeping of Microsoft.

Once you understand *that*, you understand systemd and all of the other tasteless things that have become part of distributions.

@SteveBellovin Yes. there's even an interesting tool (jc) that jsons up unix command output if you like using that toolchain. Just today I was struggling with how to pipe git output into a shell command...

https://blog.kellybrazil.com/category/jc-news/

@SteveBellovin the most important thing about this is "taste" not technical tradeoffs. The new generation of developers have different opinions on how a "good" system behaves based on preference and the different environment they operate in. "They paved over paradise" is probably true but it's done because the paved space is more useful now to the operational needs of business which uses compute to extract money.

I don't think systemd is _wrong_ it's just aligned to current needs and style

@SteveBellovin
When I connect a monitor it takes this system about a second to wake up.

When I touch the mouse or the keyboard it takes about 20 seconds to stir.

What on earth is it doing?

@SteveBellovin The job of the sysadmin is being industrialized. That is what is causing the discomfort.

The single operator having machines named after characters from Tolkien lore is disappearing or more precisely: becoming an edge case.

The „normal“ system is setup automagically via toolchain. The typical system never sees an operator logging in via ssh or console during its complete lifecycle. In modern ops, needing to do a thing by hand is worth a bug report by itself.

I am mot talking hyperscalers here, but the ops of small shops with a few thousand cores.

Yes, I have my own set of a dozen handcrafted machines (mostly VMs), but I am aware thar Linux is no longer primarily developed for my use case.

My (and probably your) use case make up only a small part of the Linux world and may not be the target for the development any more.