Maybe systemd should have been an API + a spec instead of an unportable implementation.
There's nothing really stopping other init systems from implementing it's unit spec, some hobby ones have done so.
In the case of GNOME, KDE etc depending on it, the reason mainly boils down to "we could implement our own manager for handling desktop daemons etc or just get systemd to do it for us"
Where none of the desktop environments offer the same feature set. And the more compositors there are the harder it is for apps to use those new protocols, and guaranteeing a ton of bug reports from users using an unsupported compositor. That just hinders Linux desktop app development.
Quoting vbernat's comment on Lobsters:
systemd was a "gift" for people running alternative desktop systems. Previously, many services were bundled with GNOME and you had to go through many hops to use them on a non-GNOME desktop (for example, GNOME Power Manager). systemd replaced many of these GNOME-only piece of software that were constantly breaking when you tried to use them outside of GNOME. Alternative desktop environments didn't need to write their own version of system-related tools.
So, while this may be seen as centralization, I don't think we would have seen so many desktop environments without systemd. In the past (15+ years), systems were simpler and there was not many things to abstract.
Also despite all its convenience it's not without its drawbacks. Among other things you can no longer just launch a daemon from a chroot now you need a full blown container sporting its own init.
I never tested this myself, as I also dislike GNOME3 from a UI view (I am fine with mate-desktop though), but I found this to be epic from the Gentoo folks - a single man flipping a finger to the systemd devs. The underdog winning the fight.
A shame gentoo kind of went into its own hole for years ...
This is fantastic news! As I've argued here on HN many times over the years, proper permission management is probably the single most important piece that's been keeping us from sandboxing everything by default, like on Android and iOS.
There were some early attempts in mobile Linux distros, like original Ubuntu Touch or even Nokias MeeGo and it turns out the main issue is actually improving security while not blocking whole categories of applications from working.
In the early Ubuntu Touch case I remember that you had to as a user allow your image viewer access to individual pictures from SD card, one by one, to see them in the app. This made it basically useless.
In the MeeGo use case IIRC third party chroot/shell environments like Termux were impossible due to the way their security/sandboxing system was setup. At the same time all apps had internet and microphone access & it was impossible to disallow it per app.
It's may get harder in the future to have a Linux desktop that keeps up with the times and also does not include third-party cruft or spyware in the future.
Systemd is a mix of GPL2 and LGPL. Flatpak is LGPL. Neither has a CLA. Many other parts of the ecosystem are GPLs. It makes no sense for this ecosystem to start serving up primarily FOSS applications with FOSS ethos-es as a proprietarified storefront.
Who is "they" here? There's no value to gain from closing the freedesktop ecosystem: no company has a distribution chokepoint like Google does with Play Store, the overall PC market is in decline and everyone would switch to existing anti-systemd alternatives.
the evolutionarily optimal ratio of predator:prey fluctuates based on how close/far are we to ZIRP.
> It’s important to note that everything discussed during the talk is planning, and not a single line of code has been written yet
systemd-appd sounds like it could make some inroads in the threat model that Windows and Linux still have in 2026 (and macOS is still reeling from): anything that runs as my user, can access anything running as _my_ user. I don't think this threat model was tenable in 2016, much less in 2026. But moving away from that also breaks with the Unix tradition.
Systemd as the system management layer is becoming a centerpoint for moving Linux forward, on servers but especially so on the desktop, and it does so at the cost of breaking with traditional views. It's kind of hard to watch: I want Linux to move forward, and there's just a lot of good ideas there. But it will be painful for a large Linux community to break with traditions.
Exactly. If you look back at the old discussions, you see how people tried to claim systemd is merely an init system, but it never was. So all comparisons to e. g. sysinit and what not, were unfair. Dishonest. The systemd devs were not interested in fair discussions. They wanted more control. And they very ruthlessly went forward with it - also thanks to corporate support. Just look at Poettering censoring discussions and stopping them whenever he could.
> But moving away from that also breaks with the Unix tradition.
Systemd never cared about UNIX. Poettering does not even understand UNIX on top of that.
> Systemd as the system management layer is becoming a centerpoint for moving Linux forward
Forward to ...? I don't really see it as moving "forward". I see it as more top-down control singularized into one crew that manages the software here.
> on servers but especially so on the desktop, and it does so at the cost of breaking with traditional views
Well, I would not call it "traditional", as the name is loaded. I see it more as a way to gain more control over the whole ecosystem. We see the same happen with wayland, but on a smaller scale, as wayland does not try to integrate a billion features and functionality.
> It's kind of hard to watch: I want Linux to move forward, and there's just a lot of good ideas there. But it will be painful for a large Linux community to break with traditions.
I don't like systemd, but I view this more realistic. I saw how the non-systemd distributions struggled and eventually most went extinct or were converted into systemd. Only few remain strong, and those few are often also dead - like slackware. And yes I know the spin-offs, but seriously, slackware is a dead man walking. Void is not dead, but yikes, it's not moving forward either.
It is not only systemd though. The whole linux stack got a lot bigger and more complicated. Nowadays you often need python, meson, llvm, mesa and so forth to compile things. Everything got bigger too. A lot of software was abandoned downstream, such as fluxbox - may be irrelevant to most folks, but this is one example of sooo many more. At the base of this problem sits the funding issue. Corporations have a lot more net-control over the ecosystem nowadays. Due to the funding. I think we need to solve this issue of funding, because otherwise we'll end up with systemd-like projects sitting at the key areas.
Nit: on "decades-old", Flatpack is from ~2016 only.
Systemd came out in ~2010 and maybe it was not clear if it will stay around for long enough and gain as much popularity as it did?
And if you look at the history page of Flatpak, you'll see that the project has been in development in some form or another for roughly 20 years https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/wiki/Flatpak's-History
Systemd the init service is excellent.
Systemd the catch all for trying to rewrite all services to come up with a baseline version of everything is a strange and NIH project. They would have been far better off politically by coming up with a spec and seeing if they could submit patches to get the current services to use the APIs they were planning.
Instead they just have a bundle of things they have tried to reinvent, some more successfully than others. Hence the divisions in the communities.
Jump forward to systemd and absolutely none of trust Poettering farther than we can throw him. At the same time systemd basically did the job of half a dozen programs which offends a lot of people on philosophical grounds. Simultaneously a bunch of things start hard requiring this program that people neither trust nor like.
I don't know about the philosophical aspects, but from pure technical point of view systemd brought some order into the mess. Before systemd it seemed like most distros were barely holding together with duct tape. Systemd standardized a lot of things.
I am fine with a little bit of controversy if the result is a much better desktop OS experience for the user. And as a relatively long time Linux user, I can certainly say it is much better now than it was 20 years ago.
Also having a bunch of things barely held together with duct tape is part of the philosophy.
And he complained about a lot of dependencies but then went and actually wrote fixes/solutions for them that was so good that nearly everyone started using and even depending on it.
It sounds like the people who were sitting on the sidelines complaining about his complaining had ample opportunities to write better alternatives than the programs he wrote but didn’t do so. Instead they relied on character attacks and FUD (well, except the folks who developed pipewire), while Poettering wa engage in elite hacking by implementing solutions and letting users and distro makers decide whether they wanted to use those solutions.
I don’t see how Poettering is the villain here.
Poettering seems to be good at politics. Where politics means having his way.
Not so much at writing working code, or interoperability.
Due to this design they often have underspecified interaction between the different components, since the assumption is that everyone will use largely the same baseline systemd environment and as long as it works, who cares what it does underneath. If the different parts were more independent, they would be forced to develop a cleaner API contract between them.
I had a nightmare last week wherein I read a headline that systemd was writing its own kernel. When I woke up I realized it was a possibility, after all it has replaced GRUB. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-boot
And to be perfectly honest, it's nothing more than a philosophy - it's not some universal truth, e.g. a browser by definition is not doing "one small thing" and complex workloads are better organized by monolithic software to a certain degree.
With unified kernel images there is no need for grub or any other bootloader anymore. And UKI simplifies boot configuration and helps improving security in some aspects.
How? This is really where it's basically a marketing fail.
Even your own link for system-boot shows that it is it's own rebranding of gummi-boot. It's not part of the init system, they just have an identically named project which has 100 utilities in it. It's dumb and it's community hostile.
I wouldn't recommend reading that comment thread, it immediately jumps into "this is fascism!" which is why it's hard to take people seriously sometimes.
Looking at you, DaVinci Resolve.
I'm not sure how AppImage beats Flathub, it's gotten so damn good.
Just kidding!
Soon systemd will sniff more data - such as the age:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#issuecomment-4...
And the usual copium aka this is very harmless, nothing evil is done, nothing bad can happen. That'll cover the age.
In the future systemd will sniff for more private data. For those who think this is a conspiracy theory, well - look at the last some decade or so, and query which claims made early on, about systemd, suddenly become true at a later point in time.
The systemd folks are kind of smart, though, because they provide "merely an init system" (right? Or was the comparison always unfair, because e. g. sysinit never was about adding layer of layer on top of layers) and they build on top of it, for other applications to tap into systemd - at the cost of adding a dependency.
Even LFS/BLFS succumbed recently and now only offers systemd-builds. Personally I think this is kind of betrayal to the spirit of LFS, but Bruce gave an objective argument, which is the time investment for maintaining non-systemd and systemd, and on this particular point he is quite correct. Time is a finite ressource.
What we kind of see here is that systemd keeps on growing and growing. It is the ultimate virus. You can't get rid of it. Now flatpak fell for it too, though objectively speaking I fail to see why flatpaks should have a dependency on systemd to begin with. Thankfully I use versioned AppDirs (similar to GoboLinux) so I could not care any less about flatpaks (don't need them, I already use any version of a program I want to), but flatpak also betrayed its original vision. For some reason those grand visions always become worse over time.
But no worries folks - we know one thing is true, and that is that systemd will grow even bigger. It will not stop until it has swallowed EVERYTHING.