{"slug": "systemd", "name": "systemd", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "Linux init system and service manager handling boot, services, timers, and logging.", "recommenders": 23, "commenters": 49, "warners": 14, "score": 11.387, "rising": -0.89, "first": "2025-11-02", "latest": "2026-10-16", "why": "Commenters like it for running services and containers from declarative unit files, with timers, auto-restart, socket activation and per-unit sandboxing built in.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 23, "neutral": 11, "compare": 1, "warn": 17}, "spark": [1, 3, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 7, 5, 2, 2, 1], "listed": true, "loved": ["Service and container management", "Sandboxing"], "caveat": "Complexity", "short_quote": "I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/systemd/systemd", "official_url": "https://systemd.io", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["systemd"], "verdict": [{"text": "Commenters like it for running services and containers from declarative unit files,", "cites": [{"id": 782894448, "item_id": 48930903, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930903", "by": "SMFloris", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker.", "excerpt": "IMO, kubernetes is overkill for a small non-homogeneous home cluster. What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker. It just becomes so darn simple. Do not go the compose route (that route is filled with sadness of the incomplete stacks because db container failed silently kind) - instead aim to decompose the compose files and write a separate systemd service file for each of them, you can then assign l", "context": "", "use_case": "homelab service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes"}, {"id": 780313601, "item_id": 48769600, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769600", "by": "kccqzy", "date": "2026-07-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I switched to using systemd to manage all my containers. It was worthwhile", "excerpt": "I moved in 2021. Others have pointed out that you can use podman-compose or docker-compose pointed at podman. I did something different: I switched to using systemd to manage all my containers. It was worthwhile as I can just use my usual systemctl and journalctl utilities for both containerized and non-containerized services rather than having to remember two sets of commands. I only experienced one minor issue with", "context": "", "use_case": "managing containers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Podman v6.0.0"}, {"id": 782915569, "item_id": 48932223, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932223", "by": "xienze", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Even better, systemd+podman (=quadlets).", "excerpt": "> What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker Even better, systemd+podman (=quadlets). Quadlets are great, you basically can declare a compose file as a systemd unit with all the good and bad that comes with that.", "context": "", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes"}, {"id": 739122689, "item_id": 46195168, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195168", "by": "jmmv", "date": "2025-12-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process \"supervisor\" is a better model.", "excerpt": "Thanks! > I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky. It indeed is tricky. To be honest, I wasn't \"put off\" by it because I've been using BSDs and old-style Linux startup systems for almost 30 years now... but the lack of abstraction shows, and I don't think it's great. The daemon(8) wrapper is neat to integrate pre-existing servers into rc.d, but I ", "context": "", "use_case": "process supervision", "switched_from": "", "story": "From Azure Functions to FreeBSD"}]}, {"text": " with timers, auto-restart, socket activation and per-unit sandboxing built in.", "cites": [{"id": 779789392, "item_id": 48736837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736837", "by": "foxrider", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "systemd, its timers and the user units were the most convinient change in decades", "excerpt": "I swear, the more time goes on, the more I disrespect the \"no to systemd crowd\", not because they don't have valid arguments, but because in recent years it attracted a very *specific* kind of audience, and now it smells bad. I've used Linux for over 20 years at this point, my first Linux computer was a PS2 console and my second one was a PS3 console. I remember the rc scripts and upstart, and I hated dealing with an", "context": "Linux user for 20+ years", "use_case": "Linux init and service management", "switched_from": "upstart", "story": "No Systemd"}, {"id": 773909137, "item_id": 48369321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369321", "by": "hombre_fatal", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use a systemd timer to run a monthly scrub for my btrfs pool.", "excerpt": "NixOS comes with systemd, so I've been using it as a first-class part of managing stuff. It's great, especially coming from macOS' launchd. Which makes it nice to distribute a tool for NixOS so that it can lean into systemd instead of as some bolted-on afterthought. Makes me wonder what you'd do if you were distributing a lifecycle-heavy tool for Linux users in general since systemd isn't ubiquitous. I use a systemd ", "context": "", "use_case": "scheduled btrfs scrubs", "switched_from": "launchd", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 787665040, "item_id": 49229065, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229065", "by": "iTokio", "date": "2026-08-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Or at least a systemd Restart=always service.", "excerpt": "I love to combine assertions with \u00ab restartability \u00bb. If you\u2019re program has entered an unknown, failed state, just restart it from a known state. Even better if you can divide a complex system in sub modules that can recover independently without bringing down the entire system. Something like Erlang supervision tree. Or at least a systemd Restart=always service. if your program is mostly stateless, and \u00ab restartable", "context": "", "use_case": "restarting failed services", "switched_from": "", "story": "Assert(): A Modern How To"}, {"id": 801847377, "item_id": 50115461, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115461", "by": "attilaolah", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The killer feature for me is socket activation.", "excerpt": "I also used to run everything on K8s (hybrid Talos / Alpine+k0s on nodes too small for Talos). It is a fun exercise, but with many small nodes eventually I realised I was burning a quarter of my fleet's CPU on just monitoring and routing services. Eventually I switched to Systemd only, Clan-managed NixOS instances on bare metal. The killer feature for me is socket activation. It even works with Jellyfin, wrapped in s", "context": "self-hosts on many small nodes", "use_case": "socket-activated services", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 774036064, "item_id": 48377254, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377254", "by": "okanat", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It is way simpler and cleaner than Docker/Podman IMHO.", "excerpt": "I love how easy it is to create a completely isolated daemons with systemd. In a single .service file one can define a daemon that has a very limited view to the filesystem, can only open specific devices, uses randomized UIDs, and has limited capabilities: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.exec.html It is way simpler and cleaner than Docker/Podman IMHO.", "context": "", "use_case": "isolated daemons via service files", "switched_from": "", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 740059264, "item_id": 46253704, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253704", "by": "cipherself", "date": "2025-12-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application", "excerpt": "I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application, I had a user created specifically for the application, and I defined the capabilities the application needed via CapabilityBoundingSet and AmbientCapabilities [0] and I used a lot of stuff from [1] to restrict the application e.g. the sandboxing facilities, restricting the allowed syscalls [2], ...etc. systemd also comes with a useful command syste", "context": "", "use_case": "sandboxing services with limited capabilities", "switched_from": "", "story": "Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is its size and opaque complexity,", "cites": [{"id": 737754752, "item_id": 46109672, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46109672", "by": "ux266478", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all.", "excerpt": "The OpenSSH/XZ exploit from a year or so ago was actually a systemd exploit[1], fun fact. Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all. My system always felt really opaque, because the mountain of understanding systemd seemed insurmountable. I had to remember so much, all the different levers required to drive the million things systemd orchestrated... and for very little effect. I really ", "context": "moved away from systemd distributions", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"}, {"id": 784929248, "item_id": 49058078, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49058078", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Systemd is some giant thing that does 100000 things.", "excerpt": "So, I disagree about your statement here, but let's for a moment assume it were correct - so let's not evaluate THAT particular statement, thus. You most likely refer to sysinit or something like that, right? Because to what else do you compare it to? Shell scripts? Shell scripts in general are crap. I don't understand why linux systems use them. When I transitioned to linux a long time ago, I wrote - and still write", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd Linger"}, {"id": 779462016, "item_id": 48716376, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716376", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "SystemD is great... until you hit a bug born of its accidental complexity", "excerpt": "This is very poorly phrased, but, yeah, I've found both the SystemD [0] maintainers and boosters to be very, very unwelcoming to claims that the way something in the SystemD does something is incompatible with a totally reasonable and long-standing way to use a computer. As I've mentioned elsewhere, SystemD is great... until you hit a bug born of its accidental complexity, or you find can't do something because the S", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 796148704, "item_id": 49759294, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49759294", "by": "kjs3", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it", "excerpt": "This. I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it when my team was riding herd on a DC full of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes. But for basically everything else that I use Linux for, every time someone says \"systemd does this\", at least 50% of the time I don't need that, and most of the rest I could do with with other tools with vastly less complexity.", "context": "sysadmin who managed a DC of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks"}, {"id": 732727105, "item_id": 45795444, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795444", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have nothing against systemd myself", "excerpt": "My thoughts on systemd are complicated but I wasn't around at the time of systemd Personally it is my opinion that Linux really split in two due to systemd partially because of the idea of the sheer size of systemd code There are things like https://github.com/Sweets/hummingbird which, I, not even a C person can understand and appreciate its simplicity. I am not saying that we always need such simplicity, but that I ", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": null}]}, {"text": " followed by distrust of its maintainers and its new birthdate field tied to age verification.", "cites": [{"id": 779463312, "item_id": 48716457, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716457", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Poettering and crew were -and continue to be- absolutely incapable of maintaining a project of such scope and importance.", "excerpt": "> \"Systemd as the last init we ever create\" ... they just wanted to talk about how bad SysV was and that systemd was progress... I was impeding progress... Yeah, that rhetoric was maddening. Poettering and crew were -and continue to be- absolutely incapable of maintaining a project of such scope and importance. Do you remember the fucking kdbus saga? I really wish the folks on the kernel side of that who were respons", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 748676162, "item_id": 46792260, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792260", "by": "PunchyHamster", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "if it is not problem on Lennart's laptop, it's not a real problem and it can be closed or ignored completely", "excerpt": "> The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way. Incorrect. I used mainstream distro, still had issues, that just solved itself moving to pipewire. Issues like it literally crashing or emitting spur of max volume noise once every few months for no discernable reason. Pulseaudio also completely", "context": "runs servers on UPS", "use_case": "init system and service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"}, {"id": 762030753, "item_id": 47626922, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626922", "by": "righthand", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "taking out all the icky parts as well as destroying Poettering\u2019s control over it", "excerpt": "Why doesn\u2019t someone fork systemd and start reworking/taking out all the icky parts as well as destroying Poettering\u2019s control over it? Debian\u2019s forced accepting of Systemd is finally rearing it\u2019s ugly head. I am glad I switched to Devuan earlier this year.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd BirthDate Merge: Conflicts of Interest"}, {"id": 791946864, "item_id": 49496679, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496679", "by": "huimang", "date": "2026-08-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "E.g. systemd's birthdate field", "excerpt": "So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this? E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law"}, {"id": 785732369, "item_id": 49108273, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108273", "by": "BoxwoodSeed", "date": "2026-07-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Linux is also ready to support age verification through systemd.", "excerpt": "Linux is also ready to support age verification through systemd. Luckily, there are still distros without it, like Void Linux. I switched to it recently and now my media PC boots faster than my TV takes to turn on.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"}, {"id": 789802069, "item_id": 49362629, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49362629", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-08-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "People already looked with deep worry at systemd running ahead and supporting age sniffing", "excerpt": "> Getting media to work on Linux is more complex than you may think. Not at all: ffmpeg + mpv Problem solved. > a lot less feasible for Linux distributions designed to be freely downloaded and redistributed. > [...] spent some time enabling third-party repositories to get multimedia codecs, you already know what it's like Well, this was quite easy on debian, but I abandoned being a slave to distributions. I compile f", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Service and container management", "summary": "Used to run services and Podman or Docker containers in place of Compose or Kubernetes, with the same systemctl and journalctl tools.", "quotes": [{"id": 782894448, "item_id": 48930903, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930903", "by": "SMFloris", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker.", "excerpt": "IMO, kubernetes is overkill for a small non-homogeneous home cluster. What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker. It just becomes so darn simple. Do not go the compose route (that route is filled with sadness of the incomplete stacks because db container failed silently kind) - instead aim to decompose the compose files and write a separate systemd service file for each of them, you can then assign l", "context": "", "use_case": "homelab service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes"}, {"id": 780313601, "item_id": 48769600, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769600", "by": "kccqzy", "date": "2026-07-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I switched to using systemd to manage all my containers. It was worthwhile", "excerpt": "I moved in 2021. Others have pointed out that you can use podman-compose or docker-compose pointed at podman. I did something different: I switched to using systemd to manage all my containers. It was worthwhile as I can just use my usual systemctl and journalctl utilities for both containerized and non-containerized services rather than having to remember two sets of commands. I only experienced one minor issue with", "context": "", "use_case": "managing containers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Podman v6.0.0"}, {"id": 782915569, "item_id": 48932223, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932223", "by": "xienze", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Even better, systemd+podman (=quadlets).", "excerpt": "> What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker Even better, systemd+podman (=quadlets). Quadlets are great, you basically can declare a compose file as a systemd unit with all the good and bad that comes with that.", "context": "", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes"}]}, {"label": "Sandboxing", "summary": "A single unit file can restrict filesystem view, devices, capabilities and syscalls.", "quotes": [{"id": 774036064, "item_id": 48377254, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377254", "by": "okanat", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It is way simpler and cleaner than Docker/Podman IMHO.", "excerpt": "I love how easy it is to create a completely isolated daemons with systemd. In a single .service file one can define a daemon that has a very limited view to the filesystem, can only open specific devices, uses randomized UIDs, and has limited capabilities: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.exec.html It is way simpler and cleaner than Docker/Podman IMHO.", "context": "", "use_case": "isolated daemons via service files", "switched_from": "", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 740059264, "item_id": 46253704, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253704", "by": "cipherself", "date": "2025-12-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application", "excerpt": "I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application, I had a user created specifically for the application, and I defined the capabilities the application needed via CapabilityBoundingSet and AmbientCapabilities [0] and I used a lot of stuff from [1] to restrict the application e.g. the sandboxing facilities, restricting the allowed syscalls [2], ...etc. systemd also comes with a useful command syste", "context": "", "use_case": "sandboxing services with limited capabilities", "switched_from": "", "story": "Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities"}, {"id": 796149424, "item_id": 49759339, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49759339", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities.", "excerpt": "Is your Civilization victory a Science, Military or Cultural one? I think that depends on how and if the technology is socialized and spoken of. If people feel like it's an oppressor, something they don't understand that has rolled in, and now defacto is (is shipped in every distribution of note): it feels like a Military victory. Over them. It sparks no joy. Appealing to the nerds can be a strong science victory. Pr", "context": "", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks"}]}, {"label": "Cross-distro consistency", "summary": "Gives distros a common OS layer that tools and immutable distros can build on.", "quotes": [{"id": 784974048, "item_id": 49060878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060878", "by": "vrighter", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "So systemd offers some consistency between distros: bad.", "excerpt": "the oss community has a phobia of having anything in common against all its reimplementations of the same thing. So systemd offers some consistency between distros: bad. X11 was pretty much standardized, that won't do.... let's invent wayland but make sure that there are multiple incompatible implementations of it! and so on. I love linux, but this sort of mentality is ridiculous", "context": "Linux user", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd Linger"}, {"id": 779470594, "item_id": 48716912, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716912", "by": "INTPenis", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But I love my distros with systemd too much to switch.", "excerpt": "If you want to get a good idea of how different modern Linux APIs are now compared to before. Look at cPanel vs. cockpit. cPanel had to maintain its own unified API above a slew of other interfaces, while Cockpit benefits from a unified OS API. And we're only getting started, we still have a long way to go. Yes I love the diversity of the open source ecosystem, I love that people are free to create their own distros ", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779535536, "item_id": 48720971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48720971", "by": "jeroenhd", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "systemd builds out the architecture that makes things like building immutable distros easy", "excerpt": "> instead of having it as a layer which you can install and enable if you need so is a bit sinister I don't really get it. If you don't want systemd, you can install your own OpenRC-based immutable OS. I don't know if that currently exists (Android does, I suppose? maybe ChromeOS?) but it's not like systemd is forbidding everyone from doing anything. The biggest difference between systemd and alternatives is that sys", "context": "", "use_case": "init system for immutable distros", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}]}, {"label": "Timers and user units", "summary": "Timers and user units are described as a convenient replacement for cron-style jobs and older init scripts.", "quotes": [{"id": 779789392, "item_id": 48736837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736837", "by": "foxrider", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "systemd, its timers and the user units were the most convinient change in decades", "excerpt": "I swear, the more time goes on, the more I disrespect the \"no to systemd crowd\", not because they don't have valid arguments, but because in recent years it attracted a very *specific* kind of audience, and now it smells bad. I've used Linux for over 20 years at this point, my first Linux computer was a PS2 console and my second one was a PS3 console. I remember the rc scripts and upstart, and I hated dealing with an", "context": "Linux user for 20+ years", "use_case": "Linux init and service management", "switched_from": "upstart", "story": "No Systemd"}, {"id": 773909137, "item_id": 48369321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369321", "by": "hombre_fatal", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use a systemd timer to run a monthly scrub for my btrfs pool.", "excerpt": "NixOS comes with systemd, so I've been using it as a first-class part of managing stuff. It's great, especially coming from macOS' launchd. Which makes it nice to distribute a tool for NixOS so that it can lean into systemd instead of as some bolted-on afterthought. Makes me wonder what you'd do if you were distributing a lifecycle-heavy tool for Linux users in general since systemd isn't ubiquitous. I use a systemd ", "context": "", "use_case": "scheduled btrfs scrubs", "switched_from": "launchd", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 796422624, "item_id": 49776414, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776414", "by": "mrweasel", "date": "2026-09-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use systemd timers, Prometheus and alert on failed services", "excerpt": "For things that actually matters to me, I use systemd timers, Prometheus and alert on failed services, but I do get that this might be a bit much for many setups.", "context": "", "use_case": "scheduled jobs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Sigabrt.dev \u2013 cronjob monitor with an SSH TUI"}]}, {"label": "Declarative supervision", "summary": "Declarative units with true process supervision, restart policies and socket activation.", "quotes": [{"id": 739122689, "item_id": 46195168, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195168", "by": "jmmv", "date": "2025-12-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process \"supervisor\" is a better model.", "excerpt": "Thanks! > I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky. It indeed is tricky. To be honest, I wasn't \"put off\" by it because I've been using BSDs and old-style Linux startup systems for almost 30 years now... but the lack of abstraction shows, and I don't think it's great. The daemon(8) wrapper is neat to integrate pre-existing servers into rc.d, but I ", "context": "", "use_case": "process supervision", "switched_from": "", "story": "From Azure Functions to FreeBSD"}, {"id": 787665040, "item_id": 49229065, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229065", "by": "iTokio", "date": "2026-08-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Or at least a systemd Restart=always service.", "excerpt": "I love to combine assertions with \u00ab restartability \u00bb. If you\u2019re program has entered an unknown, failed state, just restart it from a known state. Even better if you can divide a complex system in sub modules that can recover independently without bringing down the entire system. Something like Erlang supervision tree. Or at least a systemd Restart=always service. if your program is mostly stateless, and \u00ab restartable", "context": "", "use_case": "restarting failed services", "switched_from": "", "story": "Assert(): A Modern How To"}, {"id": 801847377, "item_id": 50115461, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115461", "by": "attilaolah", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The killer feature for me is socket activation.", "excerpt": "I also used to run everything on K8s (hybrid Talos / Alpine+k0s on nodes too small for Talos). It is a fun exercise, but with many small nodes eventually I realised I was burning a quarter of my fleet's CPU on just monitoring and routing services. Eventually I switched to Systemd only, Clan-managed NixOS instances on bare metal. The killer feature for me is socket activation. It even works with Jellyfin, wrapped in s", "context": "self-hosts on many small nodes", "use_case": "socket-activated services", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "What I self-host"}]}, {"label": "Convenience", "summary": "Long-time Linux users prefer it to OpenRC and SysVinit for convenience.", "quotes": [{"id": 735225616, "item_id": 45951601, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45951601", "by": "udev4096", "date": "2025-11-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "systemd scales. I love small init systems but systemd is just so convenient.", "excerpt": "systemd scales. I love small init systems but systemd is just so convenient. It handles daemon process, encryption with cryptsetup, boot process (systemd-boot), hardening options you can define on unit files, good support for nested containerization etc. It's deeply entrenched in every major distro that it's impossible to administer a linux system without it", "context": "", "use_case": "init and service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Runit Linux: Complete Guide to Unix Init Scheme with Service Supervision"}, {"id": 788163808, "item_id": 49260238, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260238", "by": "gh02t", "date": "2026-08-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have my gripes with systemd, but I personally prefer to use it over OpenRC etc.", "excerpt": "> Newer linux folks like it because they're used to it, people who don't like it use devuan, gentoo, or one of the others that still lets one use openRC or whatever else. This is a bad generalization. Counterpoint, I've been using Linux as a daily driver for like 25 years now (and have also used other Unixes/likes fairly extensively). I have my gripes with systemd, but I personally prefer to use it over OpenRC etc. I", "context": "Linux daily driver for about 25 years", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification"}, {"id": 750069440, "item_id": 46879340, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46879340", "by": "theamk", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And between two of those, systemd is a clear win.", "excerpt": ".. and that opinion is a great explanation of why systemd won. Turns out, a lot of people are not happy with \"Come on man. It's been done for decades.\" attitude, and they wanted something new and much better. And so when something new came up, they jumped on it with both feet. It's instructive to read Debian CTTE discussion on init systems (btw I think it's best tech drama of 2013, highly recommend) - a lot of people", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "SysVinit", "story": "Linux from Scratch Ends SysVinit Support"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Complexity", "summary": "Seen as large, opaque and against the Unix idea of small composable pieces.", "quotes": [{"id": 737754752, "item_id": 46109672, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46109672", "by": "ux266478", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all.", "excerpt": "The OpenSSH/XZ exploit from a year or so ago was actually a systemd exploit[1], fun fact. Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all. My system always felt really opaque, because the mountain of understanding systemd seemed insurmountable. I had to remember so much, all the different levers required to drive the million things systemd orchestrated... and for very little effect. I really ", "context": "moved away from systemd distributions", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"}, {"id": 784929248, "item_id": 49058078, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49058078", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Systemd is some giant thing that does 100000 things.", "excerpt": "So, I disagree about your statement here, but let's for a moment assume it were correct - so let's not evaluate THAT particular statement, thus. You most likely refer to sysinit or something like that, right? Because to what else do you compare it to? Shell scripts? Shell scripts in general are crap. I don't understand why linux systems use them. When I transitioned to linux a long time ago, I wrote - and still write", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd Linger"}, {"id": 736691136, "item_id": 46043196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043196", "by": "travisgriggs", "date": "2025-11-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use it because Debian uses it and I like debian.", "excerpt": "Like the author, I am saddened by systemd. I'm not rabidly opposed to it. I use it because Debian uses it and I like debian. And in some ways, I like the consistency better than the plethora of init script/run levels I used to have to deal with. But it does lack (to me) the Unix gestalt of having composable little pieces that could be pretty well put together and are each individually documentable and compose well in", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why I (Still) Love Linux ?"}]}, {"label": "Age verification", "summary": "The birthdate field is criticized as support for age verification.", "quotes": [{"id": 791946864, "item_id": 49496679, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496679", "by": "huimang", "date": "2026-08-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "E.g. systemd's birthdate field", "excerpt": "So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this? E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law"}, {"id": 785732369, "item_id": 49108273, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108273", "by": "BoxwoodSeed", "date": "2026-07-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Linux is also ready to support age verification through systemd.", "excerpt": "Linux is also ready to support age verification through systemd. Luckily, there are still distros without it, like Void Linux. I switched to it recently and now my media PC boots faster than my TV takes to turn on.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"}, {"id": 772562322, "item_id": 48285145, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285145", "by": "JCattheATM", "date": "2026-05-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "exactly the type of viral problem criticics of systemd warned about", "excerpt": "This is bad news, and exactly the type of viral problem criticics of systemd warned about. Systemd advocates always downplay the issue, but here we are. I love using Alpine, and for the few packages that don't have a musl version available (e.g. Steam), flatpak has been a great way to run them. Hopefully someone will maintain a fork.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd"}]}, {"label": "Maintainer attitude", "summary": "Maintainers are described as unwelcoming to bug reports and use cases outside their own.", "quotes": [{"id": 779462016, "item_id": 48716376, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716376", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "SystemD is great... until you hit a bug born of its accidental complexity", "excerpt": "This is very poorly phrased, but, yeah, I've found both the SystemD [0] maintainers and boosters to be very, very unwelcoming to claims that the way something in the SystemD does something is incompatible with a totally reasonable and long-standing way to use a computer. As I've mentioned elsewhere, SystemD is great... until you hit a bug born of its accidental complexity, or you find can't do something because the S", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779463312, "item_id": 48716457, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716457", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Poettering and crew were -and continue to be- absolutely incapable of maintaining a project of such scope and importance.", "excerpt": "> \"Systemd as the last init we ever create\" ... they just wanted to talk about how bad SysV was and that systemd was progress... I was impeding progress... Yeah, that rhetoric was maddening. Poettering and crew were -and continue to be- absolutely incapable of maintaining a project of such scope and importance. Do you remember the fucking kdbus saga? I really wish the folks on the kernel side of that who were respons", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 748676162, "item_id": 46792260, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792260", "by": "PunchyHamster", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "if it is not problem on Lennart's laptop, it's not a real problem and it can be closed or ignored completely", "excerpt": "> The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way. Incorrect. I used mainstream distro, still had issues, that just solved itself moving to pipewire. Issues like it literally crashing or emitting spur of max volume noise once every few months for no discernable reason. Pulseaudio also completely", "context": "runs servers on UPS", "use_case": "init system and service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"}]}, {"label": "Bugs", "summary": "Some report early bugs, CPU spikes and random failures on systemd machines.", "quotes": [{"id": 779508384, "item_id": 48719274, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48719274", "by": "Tor3", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd", "excerpt": "I ran into issues early on, I used (and needed) an 'expect' script to run as part of a daemon startup, and that just didn't work with systemd. And then on another computer 'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd, and I never managed to find out what on earth triggered that. I didn't want to spend a lot of time to solve these things, so I simply switched all my computers from Debian to Devuan (aka D", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 775647298, "item_id": 48477956, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477956", "by": "hedora", "date": "2026-06-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I currently have one systemd infected machine", "excerpt": "You can still run devuan. I highly recommend it, though FreeBSD got really good over the last few years, and is even more insulated than devuan is. I currently have one systemd infected machine, two devuan machines and two freebsd. Next step is paving the systemd one (it randomly craps out) and probably putting FreeBSD on it, but I\u2019m on the fence. It\u2019s a family member\u2019s machine, and devuan is less change.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "macOS Container Machines"}, {"id": 779467616, "item_id": 48716726, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716726", "by": "LtWorf", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It sucked when fedora and arch switched to it.", "excerpt": "It doesn't suck \"now\". It sucked when fedora and arch switched to it. I mean it of course wasn't complete garbage but it had a lot of bugs and people generally don't like to be used as red hat's guinea pigs. When red hat switched to it, it was stable enough. Before then people were complaining because they did find bugs and issues (I know I did) and were being told to STFU by inexperienced users who have the most bas", "context": "experienced sysadmin perspective", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}]}, {"label": "Breaks old workflows", "summary": "Replaces long-standing tools like cron and broke some existing startup scripts.", "quotes": [{"id": 785073680, "item_id": 49067105, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067105", "by": "egorfine", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "what systemd usually does is ideology and destruction in the name of \"new\"", "excerpt": "Yes. Improvement or not, a thing not working the way one expects means one has to do more work to figure something out. And in case of pid1, this is never a time spent productively. I'm all for improvements and I love updates of software, but what systemd usually does is ideology and destruction in the name of \"new\". Like, we have had cron perfectly working for _decades_ until one man told us we were all wrong on tha", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd Linger"}, {"id": 779508384, "item_id": 48719274, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48719274", "by": "Tor3", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd", "excerpt": "I ran into issues early on, I used (and needed) an 'expect' script to run as part of a daemon startup, and that just didn't work with systemd. And then on another computer 'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd, and I never managed to find out what on earth triggered that. I didn't want to spend a lot of time to solve these things, so I simply switched all my computers from Debian to Devuan (aka D", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}]}, {"label": "Unit file syntax", "summary": "The service file syntax is called ugly.", "quotes": [{"id": 773887824, "item_id": 48367989, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367989", "by": "jjgreen", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've been almost convinced by systemd (and have switched to using it), but God the syntax of those service files is so ugly", "excerpt": "I've been almost convinced by systemd (and have switched to using it), but God the syntax of those service files is so ugly ...", "context": "", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}]}], "who": [{"by": "attilaolah", "context": "self-hosts on many small nodes", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115461", "date": "2026-10-16"}, {"by": "kjs3", "context": "sysadmin who managed a DC of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49759294", "date": "2026-09-18"}, {"by": "gh02t", "context": "Linux daily driver for about 25 years", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260238", "date": "2026-08-11"}, {"by": "Melonai", "context": "works at a place running systemd with BIND, ISC DHCP and NetworkManager", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251619", "date": "2026-08-10"}, {"by": "skydhash", "context": "self-hosts software for a single user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210283", "date": "2026-08-07"}, {"by": "vrighter", "context": "Linux user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060878", "date": "2026-07-26"}, {"by": "foxrider", "context": "Linux user for 20+ years", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736837", "date": "2026-06-30"}, {"by": "LtWorf", "context": "experienced sysadmin perspective", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716726", "date": "2026-06-29"}, {"by": "nineteen999", "context": "built own LFS system", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870268", "date": "2026-02-03"}, {"by": "sovietmudkipz", "context": "hobbyist game dev", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314996", "date": "2025-12-18"}], "tags": ["for self-hosters", "for container management", "for NixOS users", "for Linux servers"], "use_cases": ["init system", "service management", "service dependency management", "socket-activated services", "managing app lifecycle", "scheduled jobs"], "compared": [{"slug": "docker-compose", "name": "Docker Compose", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "openrc", "name": "OpenRC", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "kubernetes", "name": "Kubernetes", "co": 4, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "podman", "name": "Podman", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "docker", "name": "Docker", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "alpine-linux", "name": "Alpine Linux", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "devuan", "name": "Devuan", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "debian", "name": "Debian", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48715630", "title": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian", "mentions": 10}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109715", "title": "What I self-host", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49756762", "title": "Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056351", "title": "Systemd Linger", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367904", "title": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249150", "title": "Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 1, "compare": 1}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 3, "neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"warn": 2}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"warn": 2}, "2026-05": {"warn": 2}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 7, "warn": 4}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 5, "warn": 3}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 2, "warn": 2}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 3, "recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 801971680, "item_id": 50123230, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123230", "by": "GetTheFacts", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I can understand why you might not be familiar with declaring systemd dependencies", "excerpt": ">How do you declare the dependencies though? The unit file only covers starting the process. That's not really true anymore. I can understand why you might not be familiar with declaring systemd dependencies as it's a fairly new thing. Don't blink or you might miss it. Check out the article[0] below, it just came out...in 2015. [0] https://fedoramagazine.org/systemd-unit-dependencies-and-order/", "context": "", "use_case": "service dependency management", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 801873058, "item_id": 50117066, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50117066", "by": "chanux", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "(and of course I use systemd)", "excerpt": "Quadlets looked super interesting when I stumbled upon it. However it still felt too much for my \"few go binaries thrown on a server\" setup. I ended up going with Ansible to set things up (and of course I use systemd).", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 801847377, "item_id": 50115461, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115461", "by": "attilaolah", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The killer feature for me is socket activation.", "excerpt": "I also used to run everything on K8s (hybrid Talos / Alpine+k0s on nodes too small for Talos). It is a fun exercise, but with many small nodes eventually I realised I was burning a quarter of my fleet's CPU on just monitoring and routing services. Eventually I switched to Systemd only, Clan-managed NixOS instances on bare metal. The killer feature for me is socket activation. It even works with Jellyfin, wrapped in s", "context": "self-hosts on many small nodes", "use_case": "socket-activated services", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 801839042, "item_id": 50114940, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114940", "by": "Balinares", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Each app's startup/shutdown is managed using the same templated systemd unit", "excerpt": "I use Docker Compose so that I don't have to care if the daemon is a single binary or a whole stack: I can use the same setup for everything, and deploying an entire new thing in a maintainable way is quick and easy. Each app's startup/shutdown is managed using the same templated systemd unit, and Traefik handles the routing and Let's Encrypt cert creation and renewal. Basically I want things reliable and low-mainten", "context": "", "use_case": "managing app lifecycle", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 796422624, "item_id": 49776414, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776414", "by": "mrweasel", "date": "2026-09-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use systemd timers, Prometheus and alert on failed services", "excerpt": "For things that actually matters to me, I use systemd timers, Prometheus and alert on failed services, but I do get that this might be a bit much for many setups.", "context": "", "use_case": "scheduled jobs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Sigabrt.dev \u2013 cronjob monitor with an SSH TUI"}, {"id": 796274352, "item_id": 49767147, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767147", "by": "dTal", "date": "2026-09-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "what systemd really provides is marketing", "excerpt": "> I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. So.... mDNS works out of the box on any glibc system with libnss-mdns and a running avahi-daemon - not \"kind of\" works, just Works. cgroups are a kernel feature that is quite straightf", "context": "systemd skeptic", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks"}, {"id": 796149424, "item_id": 49759339, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49759339", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities.", "excerpt": "Is your Civilization victory a Science, Military or Cultural one? I think that depends on how and if the technology is socialized and spoken of. If people feel like it's an oppressor, something they don't understand that has rolled in, and now defacto is (is shipped in every distribution of note): it feels like a Military victory. Over them. It sparks no joy. Appealing to the nerds can be a strong science victory. Pr", "context": "", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks"}, {"id": 796148704, "item_id": 49759294, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49759294", "by": "kjs3", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it", "excerpt": "This. I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it when my team was riding herd on a DC full of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes. But for basically everything else that I use Linux for, every time someone says \"systemd does this\", at least 50% of the time I don't need that, and most of the rest I could do with with other tools with vastly less complexity.", "context": "sysadmin who managed a DC of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks"}, {"id": 791946864, "item_id": 49496679, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496679", "by": "huimang", "date": "2026-08-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "E.g. systemd's birthdate field", "excerpt": "So is anyone going to revert the commits that jumped the gun on this? E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law"}, {"id": 789802069, "item_id": 49362629, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49362629", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-08-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "People already looked with deep worry at systemd running ahead and supporting age sniffing", "excerpt": "> Getting media to work on Linux is more complex than you may think. Not at all: ffmpeg + mpv Problem solved. > a lot less feasible for Linux distributions designed to be freely downloaded and redistributed. > [...] spent some time enabling third-party repositories to get multimedia codecs, you already know what it's like Well, this was quite easy on debian, but I abandoned being a slave to distributions. I compile f", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux"}, {"id": 788163808, "item_id": 49260238, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260238", "by": "gh02t", "date": "2026-08-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have my gripes with systemd, but I personally prefer to use it over OpenRC etc.", "excerpt": "> Newer linux folks like it because they're used to it, people who don't like it use devuan, gentoo, or one of the others that still lets one use openRC or whatever else. This is a bad generalization. Counterpoint, I've been using Linux as a daily driver for like 25 years now (and have also used other Unixes/likes fairly extensively). I have my gripes with systemd, but I personally prefer to use it over OpenRC etc. I", "context": "Linux daily driver for about 25 years", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification"}, {"id": 788025904, "item_id": 49251619, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251619", "by": "Melonai", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "There's enough stuff to hate about it! I think it's not really necessary to pretend that your init system runs a DNS server and stores birthdays.", "excerpt": "Maybe I'm about to be too pedantic, but I never quite got the argument of systemd being massively bloated based on examples of it including DNS and DHCP. Sure it's a mono-repository that includes all these services, but in the end you do run them separately? The actual \"systemd, the init system\" doesn't have DNS, DHCP or a user birthday database built-in, those are contained in their own services, namely systemd-reso", "context": "works at a place running systemd with BIND, ISC DHCP and NetworkManager", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification"}, {"id": 787665040, "item_id": 49229065, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229065", "by": "iTokio", "date": "2026-08-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Or at least a systemd Restart=always service.", "excerpt": "I love to combine assertions with \u00ab restartability \u00bb. If you\u2019re program has entered an unknown, failed state, just restart it from a known state. Even better if you can divide a complex system in sub modules that can recover independently without bringing down the entire system. Something like Erlang supervision tree. Or at least a systemd Restart=always service. if your program is mostly stateless, and \u00ab restartable", "context": "", "use_case": "restarting failed services", "switched_from": "", "story": "Assert(): A Modern How To"}, {"id": 787364529, "item_id": 49210283, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210283", "by": "skydhash", "date": "2026-08-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "My extent at sysadmin is to write a systemd service", "excerpt": "All of those requirements seem weird. I selfhost a few software and the user count is one. My extent at sysadmin is to write a systemd service, configure the proxy (if it\u2019s on a vps and I use subdomains), and maybe use ansible for scripting the provisioning and deploy. It\u2019s fine to publish recommendations how to tune configurations for specific usages. But I only need the app, not the various things that you may thin", "context": "self-hosts software for a single user", "use_case": "running self-hosted services", "switched_from": "", "story": "The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale"}, {"id": 785732369, "item_id": 49108273, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108273", "by": "BoxwoodSeed", "date": "2026-07-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Linux is also ready to support age verification through systemd.", "excerpt": "Linux is also ready to support age verification through systemd. Luckily, there are still distros without it, like Void Linux. I switched to it recently and now my media PC boots faster than my TV takes to turn on.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"}, {"id": 785073680, "item_id": 49067105, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067105", "by": "egorfine", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "what systemd usually does is ideology and destruction in the name of \"new\"", "excerpt": "Yes. Improvement or not, a thing not working the way one expects means one has to do more work to figure something out. And in case of pid1, this is never a time spent productively. I'm all for improvements and I love updates of software, but what systemd usually does is ideology and destruction in the name of \"new\". Like, we have had cron perfectly working for _decades_ until one man told us we were all wrong on tha", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd Linger"}, {"id": 784974048, "item_id": 49060878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060878", "by": "vrighter", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "So systemd offers some consistency between distros: bad.", "excerpt": "the oss community has a phobia of having anything in common against all its reimplementations of the same thing. So systemd offers some consistency between distros: bad. X11 was pretty much standardized, that won't do.... let's invent wayland but make sure that there are multiple incompatible implementations of it! and so on. I love linux, but this sort of mentality is ridiculous", "context": "Linux user", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd Linger"}, {"id": 784929248, "item_id": 49058078, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49058078", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Systemd is some giant thing that does 100000 things.", "excerpt": "So, I disagree about your statement here, but let's for a moment assume it were correct - so let's not evaluate THAT particular statement, thus. You most likely refer to sysinit or something like that, right? Because to what else do you compare it to? Shell scripts? Shell scripts in general are crap. I don't understand why linux systems use them. When I transitioned to linux a long time ago, I wrote - and still write", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd Linger"}, {"id": 783967072, "item_id": 48997942, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997942", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-07-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "systemd already has that field for your age", "excerpt": "That's good, but the lobbyists in the EU will continue to try to destroy VPN. The \"we must protect children\" is the ruse they are using right now. Everyone will have a unique ID in the future, otherwise you will be unable to browse (at the least for commercial systems such as Microsoft-based computer systems; I can not yet predict how it will work for Linux but systemd already has that field for your age: https://git", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"}, {"id": 782915569, "item_id": 48932223, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932223", "by": "xienze", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Even better, systemd+podman (=quadlets).", "excerpt": "> What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker Even better, systemd+podman (=quadlets). Quadlets are great, you basically can declare a compose file as a systemd unit with all the good and bad that comes with that.", "context": "", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes"}, {"id": 782894448, "item_id": 48930903, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930903", "by": "SMFloris", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker.", "excerpt": "IMO, kubernetes is overkill for a small non-homogeneous home cluster. What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker. It just becomes so darn simple. Do not go the compose route (that route is filled with sadness of the incomplete stacks because db container failed silently kind) - instead aim to decompose the compose files and write a separate systemd service file for each of them, you can then assign l", "context": "", "use_case": "homelab service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes"}, {"id": 780313601, "item_id": 48769600, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769600", "by": "kccqzy", "date": "2026-07-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I switched to using systemd to manage all my containers. It was worthwhile", "excerpt": "I moved in 2021. Others have pointed out that you can use podman-compose or docker-compose pointed at podman. I did something different: I switched to using systemd to manage all my containers. It was worthwhile as I can just use my usual systemctl and journalctl utilities for both containerized and non-containerized services rather than having to remember two sets of commands. I only experienced one minor issue with", "context": "", "use_case": "managing containers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Podman v6.0.0"}, {"id": 780298787, "item_id": 48768674, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48768674", "by": "yoyohello13", "date": "2026-07-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "On the server we use quartet+systemd and it\u2019s great.", "excerpt": "We have a consistent wsl image for everyone. So they are all on Linux. Then we have a podman pod defined in a bash script. We have a Justfile where you can run \u2018just services\u2019 and it all \u201cjust works (tm)\u201d. Once the pod is defined you can use \u2018podman pod up/down\u2019 to interact with it, but mostly we encourage people to use the Just recipes to do the things. The thing is, podman has docker-compose like management built i", "context": "", "use_case": "server service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Podman v6.0.0"}, {"id": 779789392, "item_id": 48736837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736837", "by": "foxrider", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "systemd, its timers and the user units were the most convinient change in decades", "excerpt": "I swear, the more time goes on, the more I disrespect the \"no to systemd crowd\", not because they don't have valid arguments, but because in recent years it attracted a very *specific* kind of audience, and now it smells bad. I've used Linux for over 20 years at this point, my first Linux computer was a PS2 console and my second one was a PS3 console. I remember the rc scripts and upstart, and I hated dealing with an", "context": "Linux user for 20+ years", "use_case": "Linux init and service management", "switched_from": "upstart", "story": "No Systemd"}, {"id": 779535536, "item_id": 48720971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48720971", "by": "jeroenhd", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "systemd builds out the architecture that makes things like building immutable distros easy", "excerpt": "> instead of having it as a layer which you can install and enable if you need so is a bit sinister I don't really get it. If you don't want systemd, you can install your own OpenRC-based immutable OS. I don't know if that currently exists (Android does, I suppose? maybe ChromeOS?) but it's not like systemd is forbidding everyone from doing anything. The biggest difference between systemd and alternatives is that sys", "context": "", "use_case": "init system for immutable distros", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779508384, "item_id": 48719274, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48719274", "by": "Tor3", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd", "excerpt": "I ran into issues early on, I used (and needed) an 'expect' script to run as part of a daemon startup, and that just didn't work with systemd. And then on another computer 'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd, and I never managed to find out what on earth triggered that. I didn't want to spend a lot of time to solve these things, so I simply switched all my computers from Debian to Devuan (aka D", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779470594, "item_id": 48716912, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716912", "by": "INTPenis", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But I love my distros with systemd too much to switch.", "excerpt": "If you want to get a good idea of how different modern Linux APIs are now compared to before. Look at cPanel vs. cockpit. cPanel had to maintain its own unified API above a slew of other interfaces, while Cockpit benefits from a unified OS API. And we're only getting started, we still have a long way to go. Yes I love the diversity of the open source ecosystem, I love that people are free to create their own distros ", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779467616, "item_id": 48716726, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716726", "by": "LtWorf", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It sucked when fedora and arch switched to it.", "excerpt": "It doesn't suck \"now\". It sucked when fedora and arch switched to it. I mean it of course wasn't complete garbage but it had a lot of bugs and people generally don't like to be used as red hat's guinea pigs. When red hat switched to it, it was stable enough. Before then people were complaining because they did find bugs and issues (I know I did) and were being told to STFU by inexperienced users who have the most bas", "context": "experienced sysadmin perspective", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779467264, "item_id": 48716704, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716704", "by": "wewewedxfgdf", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And it's awesome I love Systemd.", "excerpt": "It can reasonably be argued that Systemd is a very substantial chunk of what the operating system actually is. The kernel has a very focused job to do. The hard work of running the show on top of the kernel - and it's a big job - is done by Systemd. And it's awesome I love Systemd. If you dislike Systemde I can only imagine you haven't really taken the time to learn it and use it properly.", "context": "", "use_case": "init and system management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779466544, "item_id": 48716659, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716659", "by": "muvlon", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's better for a distro to pick any single init system than to try to support them all", "excerpt": "FWIW, debian did the gentoo approach for years. I used to run debian with OpenRC during a time when systemd was already the default. It and other init systems remained fully supported by the distro for quite a while. Eventually, the pain of supporting everything became too much and debian did go with \"my way or the highway\", which I supported at the time and still do. I have no idea how that could be \"objectively wor", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779463312, "item_id": 48716457, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716457", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Poettering and crew were -and continue to be- absolutely incapable of maintaining a project of such scope and importance.", "excerpt": "> \"Systemd as the last init we ever create\" ... they just wanted to talk about how bad SysV was and that systemd was progress... I was impeding progress... Yeah, that rhetoric was maddening. Poettering and crew were -and continue to be- absolutely incapable of maintaining a project of such scope and importance. Do you remember the fucking kdbus saga? I really wish the folks on the kernel side of that who were respons", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779463121, "item_id": 48716445, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716445", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Many bought into the pro-systemd advertisement without challenging it ever.", "excerpt": "Gentoo is great from a philosophy point of view. From a practical point of view, though, Gentoo kind of struggled a lot. Archlinux kind of took away a lot of the user base here and I don't think Arch is necessarily worse than Gentoo, even if Gentoo may still be better due to offering more choice, which is also true. I myself fell victim to the GoboLinux philosophy, so versioned AppDirs are the only logical way to ins", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779462176, "item_id": 48716386, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716386", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Systemd has NEVER been solely or primarily been an \"init\" system.", "excerpt": "The article makes one key mistake, in that it compares systemd to openrc. Aka some monster-system with billion features, to a fairly small system that juts relates to initializing a few things. The whole debate about systemd has always been very dishonest from the systemd devs. If you have 3 million lines of code, for instance, and offer 5000 features, just to give out semi-random numbers, then every alternative with", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 779462016, "item_id": 48716376, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716376", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "SystemD is great... until you hit a bug born of its accidental complexity", "excerpt": "This is very poorly phrased, but, yeah, I've found both the SystemD [0] maintainers and boosters to be very, very unwelcoming to claims that the way something in the SystemD does something is incompatible with a totally reasonable and long-standing way to use a computer. As I've mentioned elsewhere, SystemD is great... until you hit a bug born of its accidental complexity, or you find can't do something because the S", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"}, {"id": 776236162, "item_id": 48514760, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514760", "by": "shevy-java", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed", "excerpt": "> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded. Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the \"we don't need external contributors so we close that ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Leaving Mozilla"}, {"id": 775647298, "item_id": 48477956, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477956", "by": "hedora", "date": "2026-06-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I currently have one systemd infected machine", "excerpt": "You can still run devuan. I highly recommend it, though FreeBSD got really good over the last few years, and is even more insulated than devuan is. I currently have one systemd infected machine, two devuan machines and two freebsd. Next step is paving the systemd one (it randomly craps out) and probably putting FreeBSD on it, but I\u2019m on the fence. It\u2019s a family member\u2019s machine, and devuan is less change.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "macOS Container Machines"}, {"id": 774036064, "item_id": 48377254, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377254", "by": "okanat", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It is way simpler and cleaner than Docker/Podman IMHO.", "excerpt": "I love how easy it is to create a completely isolated daemons with systemd. In a single .service file one can define a daemon that has a very limited view to the filesystem, can only open specific devices, uses randomized UIDs, and has limited capabilities: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.exec.html It is way simpler and cleaner than Docker/Podman IMHO.", "context": "", "use_case": "isolated daemons via service files", "switched_from": "", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 773909137, "item_id": 48369321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369321", "by": "hombre_fatal", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use a systemd timer to run a monthly scrub for my btrfs pool.", "excerpt": "NixOS comes with systemd, so I've been using it as a first-class part of managing stuff. It's great, especially coming from macOS' launchd. Which makes it nice to distribute a tool for NixOS so that it can lean into systemd instead of as some bolted-on afterthought. Makes me wonder what you'd do if you were distributing a lifecycle-heavy tool for Linux users in general since systemd isn't ubiquitous. I use a systemd ", "context": "", "use_case": "scheduled btrfs scrubs", "switched_from": "launchd", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 773887824, "item_id": 48367989, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367989", "by": "jjgreen", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've been almost convinced by systemd (and have switched to using it), but God the syntax of those service files is so ugly", "excerpt": "I've been almost convinced by systemd (and have switched to using it), but God the syntax of those service files is so ugly ...", "context": "", "use_case": "service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 772562322, "item_id": 48285145, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285145", "by": "JCattheATM", "date": "2026-05-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "exactly the type of viral problem criticics of systemd warned about", "excerpt": "This is bad news, and exactly the type of viral problem criticics of systemd warned about. Systemd advocates always downplay the issue, but here we are. I love using Alpine, and for the few packages that don't have a musl version available (e.g. Steam), flatpak has been a great way to run them. Hopefully someone will maintain a fork.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd"}, {"id": 762030753, "item_id": 47626922, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626922", "by": "righthand", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "taking out all the icky parts as well as destroying Poettering\u2019s control over it", "excerpt": "Why doesn\u2019t someone fork systemd and start reworking/taking out all the icky parts as well as destroying Poettering\u2019s control over it? Debian\u2019s forced accepting of Systemd is finally rearing it\u2019s ugly head. I am glad I switched to Devuan earlier this year.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Systemd BirthDate Merge: Conflicts of Interest"}, {"id": 748676162, "item_id": 46792260, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792260", "by": "PunchyHamster", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "if it is not problem on Lennart's laptop, it's not a real problem and it can be closed or ignored completely", "excerpt": "> The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way. Incorrect. I used mainstream distro, still had issues, that just solved itself moving to pipewire. Issues like it literally crashing or emitting spur of max volume noise once every few months for no discernable reason. Pulseaudio also completely", "context": "runs servers on UPS", "use_case": "init system and service management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"}, {"id": 740059264, "item_id": 46253704, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253704", "by": "cipherself", "date": "2025-12-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application", "excerpt": "I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application, I had a user created specifically for the application, and I defined the capabilities the application needed via CapabilityBoundingSet and AmbientCapabilities [0] and I used a lot of stuff from [1] to restrict the application e.g. the sandboxing facilities, restricting the allowed syscalls [2], ...etc. systemd also comes with a useful command syste", "context": "", "use_case": "sandboxing services with limited capabilities", "switched_from": "", "story": "Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities"}, {"id": 739122689, "item_id": 46195168, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195168", "by": "jmmv", "date": "2025-12-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process \"supervisor\" is a better model.", "excerpt": "Thanks! > I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky. It indeed is tricky. To be honest, I wasn't \"put off\" by it because I've been using BSDs and old-style Linux startup systems for almost 30 years now... but the lack of abstraction shows, and I don't think it's great. The daemon(8) wrapper is neat to integrate pre-existing servers into rc.d, but I ", "context": "", "use_case": "process supervision", "switched_from": "", "story": "From Azure Functions to FreeBSD"}, {"id": 737754752, "item_id": 46109672, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46109672", "by": "ux266478", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all.", "excerpt": "The OpenSSH/XZ exploit from a year or so ago was actually a systemd exploit[1], fun fact. Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all. My system always felt really opaque, because the mountain of understanding systemd seemed insurmountable. I had to remember so much, all the different levers required to drive the million things systemd orchestrated... and for very little effect. I really ", "context": "moved away from systemd distributions", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"}, {"id": 732727105, "item_id": 45795444, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795444", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have nothing against systemd myself", "excerpt": "My thoughts on systemd are complicated but I wasn't around at the time of systemd Personally it is my opinion that Linux really split in two due to systemd partially because of the idea of the sheer size of systemd code There are things like https://github.com/Sweets/hummingbird which, I, not even a C person can understand and appreciate its simplicity. I am not saying that we always need such simplicity, but that I ", "context": "", "use_case": "init system", "switched_from": "", "story": null}]}