UPDATE: after many comments, let me be clear that i have nothing against systemd at a technical level. It indeed solves issues that people had and found it’s way in most mainstream distros for good reasons, beside being pushed by Redhat and Debian, which makes for basically every other mainstream distro out there without much choice. I never used it long enough to judge it, and i dont intend to judge it from a technical point of view. I am worried that such a centra piece of technology deeply interwined with linux is under direct control of IBM and Microsoft (who is the employer of the systemd lead). This might mean nothing, or this could be important for the long time future of linux freedom.

I have recently been exposed to a lot of stuff against systemd.

I know its an old debate that has inflamed people for a long time, I am not looking into restarting it as I never took a stance into it in the past anyway.

I am myself a almost 30+ years power user of Linux and I have never used systemd much myself since it never fixed any issues I had with the previous approaches, and since I am a good user of Gentoo, always loved the freedom to just keep using OpenRC and din’t ever bother with systemd.

I like the Unix approach and at the same time, if it is not broken don’t fix it, is my basic idea. So my approach to systemd has been not of dislike, rather of I don’t care, I don’t need it. And I never needed it anyway.

After reading trough most of the links below I start to think that maybe my stance could be more than simple technical.

What are other lemmy-ers idea on all this?

I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the Linux Foundation either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

TLDR: I don’t dislike systemd, I never cared about systemd. Do I need to start caring now due to all this non technical issues?

Note: i a copying verbatim the following article to stress that these are not my personal opinions and that i didnt do a proper research on the topic, except reading (most) of the links below.

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(The following is a post on the #libreware telegram channel on the 7th/8th of February 2025)

Lennart Poettering intends to replace “sudo” with #systemd’s run0. Here’s a quick PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploiting the fact “systemd-run” (the basis of uid0/run0, the sudo replacer) creates a user owned pty for communication with the new “root” process.

This isn’t the only bug of course, it’s not possible on Linux to read the environment of a root owned process but as systemd creates a service in the system slice, you can query D-BUS and learn sensitive information passed to the process env, such as API keys or other secrets.

https://fixupx.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559

Nitter mirror: https://xcancel.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559

Here are some links about #systemd #alternatives for #Linux in no particular order. Which are your favorite alternatives and distros?

https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/

https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html

https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/

https://nosystemd.org/

https://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html

https://the-world-after-systemd.ungleich.ch/

https://ewontfix.com/14/

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=120652

https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/

https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom

https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/linux-systemd-exploit.html

https://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/systemd-it-keeps-getting-worse/

https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/why.php

Some more added here too: https://start.me/p/Kg8keE/priv-sec

#systemd #Linux