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?
In fact, this is a difficult question.
In Linux, it is usually customary to use the K.I.S.S. methodology, In any case, it was once customary to use it. This in some way meant that there were a huge number of applications performing exactly one task. For example, chron only started timers, ntpd only adjusted the time, grub only loaded the system and nothing else. It also allowed you to change the components at your discretion. With systemd this principle was somewhat lost, since one service with a huge number of its own daemons absorbs more and more functions. This is what causes concern. In some sense, if systemd at some point becomes even more monolithic, it will no longer be possible to change only part of its functionality. For example, I’m not sure if it’s possible to disable journald and leave only rsyslog.
On the other hand, the now-forgotten init.V fully adhered to the principle of K.I.S.S. since he was literally the initiator of a set of scripts that could contain anything. If you want, change the user at startup via exec, if you want via su. Isolate the application with any available program. It was as flexible as possible, but on the other hand, the entry threshold was quite high. The complexity of writing scripts for init.V was much higher than systemd.
Therefore, there is no single answer. On the one hand, init.V have maximum modularity, on the other hand, systemd have ease of use.
It’s never been customary to adhere to KISS in Linux. This whole explanation reads like it came out of a game of Chinese whispers.