• Olap@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    When does systemd stop? Linux without it is increasingly looking unlikely in the future. Are we not worried about it being a single point of failure and attack vector?

    This isn’t a moan about the unix philosophy btw, but a genuine curiosity about how we split responsibilities in todays linux environment.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      SystemD will consume the entirety of Linux, bit by bit.

      • In 2032, SystemD announces they’re going to be introducing a new way to manage software on Linux
      • In 2035, SystemD will announce they’re making a display system to replace the ageing Wayland
      • In 2038, the SystemD team announces they’re making their own desktop environment
      • In 2039 SystemD’s codebase has grown to sixteen times its size in the 2020s. SystemD’s announces they’re going to release replacements for most other packages and ship their own vanilla distro.
      • In 2045 SystemD’s distro has become the standard Linux distribution. Most other distros have quietly faded away.
      • In 2047, SystemD announces they’re going to incorporate most of GNU into SystemD. Outrage ensues from the Free Software Foundation, which vehemently opposes this move.
      • In 2048, Richard Stallman dies of a heart attack after attempting to clone SystemD’s git repo. SystemD engages in a hostile takeover and all resistance within the FSF crumbles
      • In 2050, SystemD buys the struggling RedHat from IBM for $61 million.
      • In 2053, most world governments have been pressured into using SystemD.
      • In 2054, Linus Torvalds, fearing for his life, begins negotiations to merge kernel development into SystemD
      • In 2056, the final message on the Linux kernel development mailing list is sent.
      • In 2058, Torvalds dies under suspicious circumstances after his brand-new laptop battery explodes.
      • In 2060, SystemD agents assassinate the CEO of Microsoft.
      • In 2063, after immense pressure from SystemD-controlled human rights organisations, Arch developers discontinue development.
      • In 2064, the remaining living Debian developers release the next stable version of their clandestine and highly illegal distro.
      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        I think you might want to recheck the ages of some of the people in your timeline, most of them aren’t that young anymore.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Yes, because it’s easier to take care of octogenarians than people who might actually put up a fight to having their laptop batteries replaced with a pipe bomb.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Debian in many ways isn’t as slow-moving as people think.

          For example, they moved to Wayland by default (for Gnome anyway) in 2019. A number of well-known distros likely won’t have that until 2025/2026 or beyond.

          • 0x0@programming.dev
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            6 months ago

            Sadly they’ve been dropping archs throughout the years, meaning they’re no longer the distro you can use to run on “anything” from a pi to a mainframe…

            • yoevli@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Doesn’t trixie still support like a dozen arches? I think one of the more recent deprecations was MIPS BE which is functionally obsolete in 2024, at least insofar as practically no one is using it to run a modern distribution.

              • CrazyLikeGollum@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Bookworm, Trixie, and Sid all currently support a total of 10 different architectures.

                And looking through the Wikipedia article for Debian’s version history, most of the dropped architectures were functionally obsolete when they were dropped, or like the Motorola 68000, when support was added. (notable exceptions being IA-64 which was dropped 4 years before intel discontinued it, SPARC which is still supported by Oracle, and PowerPC.)

              • 0x0@programming.dev
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                6 months ago

                If your bar is “modern distribution” stick to Ubuntu.

                If you want to maintain older hardware Debian used to be a go-to solution.

      • NekkoDroid@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        One way to notice a person has “systemd derangement syndrome” is by looking at how they write systemd: if they write it SystemD they are already in late stages of SDS and it isn’t curable anymore.

    • mogoh@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      By this logic the Linux kernel is also a single point of failure and attack vector.

      sudo isn’t going away, so does doas. run0 is just another alternative to use or not.

      There are still distribution out there without systemd and if there ever won’t be any systemd-free distributions left and systemd would become a critical part of the Linux ecosystem, then it would get the same treatment as the Linux kernel with many professional maintainers.

      • cole@lemdro.id
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        6 months ago

        plus, it isn’t like this isn’t exactly like adding another “door” to the “systemd building”. It’s a modular component of systemd, so more akin to replacing the sudo building with a new, but still separate, systemd sudo building

    • Petar Kulić@mstdn.plus
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      6 months ago

      @Olap
      I agree. As someone who uses systemd on daily basis (I use Arch, BTW 😄) I really like it, but I am a bit worried about it being a single point of attack. Maybe just push doas as default instead? I never used doas but I watched few videos about it, so I guess it’s fine and probably better than sudo (less bloated).
      Just my few cents.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        I don’t see how something would be inherently easier to attack if it is called systemd-foo instead of just foo. Attack surface and vectors do not depend on which project develops a particular tool.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      Gentoo, Slackware and Devuan can be used without svchost for linux.

      They’ll only stop when they rebrand it to systemd OS.

      • notabot@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Debian works fine without systemd too, there’s a page on the wiki on how to install without it, or remove it after the fact.

        • rcbrk@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          Easy with sudo apt remove --purge --allow-remove-essential --auto-remove systemd:

          The predictable failure of things towards the end of apt running the above command. Still in a gnome terminal, but the apt script couldn't even complete due to a bunch of stuff now missing

          Uh-oh.. a black vt on reboot, complaining that no inittab found..

          :-D Time to go outside.

        • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          A lot of debs add services to systemd, do those just skip that part?

          • notabot@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            They seem to. Debian explicitly supports multiple init systems, sysvinit being the primary alternative, so packages have to handle systemd-init not being there.

    • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      Systemd is a bit of a hassle to be rid off, but thankfully it’s not actually that hard, the hardest part I found was converting systemd services to whatever init system I use.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I wonder how many hours you sunk into that practicality-free, weird-philosopy-dependent project

        • notabot@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Probably not much time, a lot of packages come with init scripts anyway, and they’re pretty trivial to write if not.

          You can certainly argue it’s a philosophical choice, I’d say it’s more down to recognising the many poor architectural choices in systemd, rubbing agaist its many pain points and misfeatures and being alarmed at the size of the attack surface it exposes. I understand there is an effort underway to reduce the size and complexity of the main shared library to help address the last point, but just the fact that is necessary shows the scope of the problem.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Systemd is fine. If it wasn’t, most distros wouldn’t have switched to it years ago.

            • notabot@lemm.ee
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              6 months ago

              Let’s agree to disagree on that point. Redhat switched because they invented it, and so took all the RHEL derivative distros with them. Debian switched to prefer it after a rather contentious vote and so took all the Debian derivative distros, including Ubuntu, with them. That just leaves a lot of the smaller distros, most of which seem to have stuck with sysvinit or similar as far as I can see.

              • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                The arguments against systemd are very unconvincing but more importantly, there is zero evidence that they actually matter.

                And it works.

                Further, in order to represent this as a nearly unilateral decision you failed to mention that arch, centos, and opensuse all opted in independently.

                And no offense but angry Internet randos arguing software philosophy will never convince me to disagree with the creator of the Linux kernel.

                Linus Torvalds said:

                “I don’t actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I’ve had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues.”

                • notabot@lemm.ee
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                  6 months ago

                  I obviously find the arguments against systemd more persuasive than you do, and that’s fine, it’s all open source and we can all make our own choices about it. My experience with it over the years has been, and still is that it vastly over complicates things that used to be simple, often the less commonly used parts just don’t work right (the automounter is a particular bugbear of mine, and few distros seem to use the network management component). The arguments do matter in practical terms as they directly impact how it works.

                  Of the distros you mentioned, centos is a RHEL derivative and so wasn’t independent, arch packages multiple init systems, but yes, I’d forgotten opensuse, and they seem to be firmly in the systemd camp.

                  I may be an internet rando, but I’m not actually angry, more just disappointed. I’d agree with Mr Torvald’s opinion that some of the design details are insane, but I think they are more fundamental than just ‘details’ as many are to do with the fundamental concepts around what systemd is and how it works. Linus can be a real dragon around changes to the kernel, but he’s always tended to be more relaxed about the layers above it.

                  That the developers of systemd are ‘much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility’ is surely clear to anyone who follows the relevant mailing lists and bug trackers, and should alarm everyone.

                  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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                    6 months ago

                    That quote carries the opposite connotation of what you seem to take from it. He’s saying despite having issues with the devs, he acknowledges those issues probably don’t matter.

                    I admit I don’t understand the internals of any of these systems. But I do understand that if the creator of the kernel isn’t concerned about systemd, and that if the vast majority of distros use systemd, then it indeed works well enough. The systemd apocalypse never happened and likely never would happen.

                    I see this argument as software conservatism. The rest of us will be okay with the thousands of knowledgeable developers that seem to think systemd works just fine.

        • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          took me about an hour to get started with artix originally, and maybe a couple more to really familiarize myself with the init. As for practicallity, it’s been a large improvement for me.