Systemd Linger

7/26/2026 at 12:06:52 PM

This is why i dislike systemd. Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

by graemep

7/26/2026 at 12:09:01 PM

In my experience, systemd is much better documented, way more consistent, and way more reliable than what came before.

by Hendrikto

7/26/2026 at 12:26:51 PM

I guess it depends on your source of info but I've found what came before was pretty comprehensively & accessibly documented, at least as well as systemd, which - while well documented - suffers from sprawl & overwhelm of the docs. There's just SO MUCH to grok in comparison.

by lucideer

7/26/2026 at 12:40:53 PM

I never found systemd difficult, but I do find prior solutions to be simpler. An init script is easy, and the order is also easy. If people are accustomed to UNIX systems, the sysvinit is better. For people who never experienced those systems, systemd is their friend. No need to use UNIX tools when Systemd ships with batteries included.

by BirAdam

7/26/2026 at 1:41:09 PM

Yeah, init scripts are simple, but things get tricky outside of the happy path. Think of service upgrades/restarts. Once you care about dependencies, then you are back to a graph like systemd's.

by dietr1ch

7/26/2026 at 6:07:53 PM

If ever handled thousands of servers running Linux with sysvinit, you get quite accustomed to it… and the tricky bits aren’t that tricky.

by BirAdam

7/26/2026 at 2:05:04 PM

talking "outside happy path" in defense of systemd is wild. because that's it's Achilles heel.

systemd is awfully documented (volume is not quality), things are still changing and haven't even caught up in functionality with any init hack.

the only saving grace of systemd is that it almost makes it easier to use namespace and other sandbox (but only because those are newer and init systems also didn't have their solutions up yet)

systemd only purpose is to mimic windows administration in linux. sorry of anyone who fails to see this

by iririririr

7/26/2026 at 5:31:10 PM

How are hacky init scripts written in shellscript well documented? Can you point me to this documentation?

When are the init systems going to implement the basic security measures systemd has?

by jamespo

7/26/2026 at 2:01:32 PM

No way. I was easily able to create Systemd units from 0-knowledge, where the init system remains a big black box riddled with question marks for a very long time. Very little was documented.

by 7bit

7/26/2026 at 12:36:38 PM

Absolutely not the case. Even relatively simple real world uses involved collections of shell scripts to carefully mount or initialize services in just the right order and would often fail with weird and infrequent timing glitches. With systemd that all becomes explicit, so of course it is awkwardly verbose. That is the whole point and a huge upgrade.

by m0llusk

7/26/2026 at 1:35:41 PM

I never used shell scripts for that. Ruby worked much better and easier. No glitches either.

I also fail to see how verbosity is a "huge upgrade".

by shevy-java

7/26/2026 at 9:09:50 PM

The problem is Ruby is not de-facto installed on most distros. Shell is the "universal" thing, but shell is actually not portable, even across distros. Perl is the only thing I'd qualify as both "sufficiently portal" and "universal". But then you have to write Perl, which nobody wants to do seemingly.

by preg_match

7/26/2026 at 5:34:36 PM

So your systems have a dependency on ruby to startup and anyone who maintains it has to know ruby?

by jamespo

7/26/2026 at 6:09:45 PM

We can argue about which has better docs, but, to me, systems offers a uniformity of practices and a consistency of service offerings that was never the case before.

Ever company used to have to make its own decisions about what logging solution to use. Each one had its own configuration paradigms! Every single daemon had some kind of bespoke /etc/init.d/ script that had its own rules and practices, having either forked off some other skeleton or having been made on it's own at some point.

And then companies wanted to do the right thing and apply some capabilities restrictions to processes. They wanted a little more than out of box security. That results in every company forming and modifying init scripts, changing the configuration paradigms, encoding config directly in or inventing their own new parameterization.

The fact is I don't have to look at docs any more, because everything has a (pleasant) uniformity. The fact is we are worlds better at securing and locking down our processes, because systemd has incredible built in options for capability, sandboxing, and other fantastic security processes.

> There's just SO MUCH to grok in comparison.

There always was before too. Most people skated along the surface, but when some daemon tried to actually have better practices, do some security tightening, operators were in for that exciting rabbit hole of trying to catch up and learn. Or just hand wave it away.

I think this statement really iconifies the systemd resistance really. Yes there is so much (imo: enjoy it, isn't that so great?) It's many many many latent possibilities (for you to over time learn): it's so often what the kernel is offering you, it's well exposed, and you have a pleasant uniform system for harnessing that, that you only have to learn once and which can pay dividends again and again and again once you learn it. Learn once, use many.

Or just ask your LLM. It knows. It will just tell you. It won't have to read docs or source. It knows systemd very well. Because it is something shared, something known. Imo it ought be something treasured.

I'm fine if some day we get rid of systemd. Nothing sacred here. But to attack it, it must be attacked from above. It must be replaced by something with more principled and more capabilities. Same as Kube. Neither is going away, neither will ever be displaced by smaller offerings. The only way out is through, the only way out is up. Godspeed, good luck, have fun.

by jauntywundrkind

7/26/2026 at 7:56:15 PM

> Ever company used to have to make its own decisions about what logging solution to use. Each one had its own configuration paradigms! Every single daemon had some kind of bespoke /etc/init.d/ script that had its own rules and practices, having either forked off some other skeleton or having been made on it's own at some point.

> And then companies wanted to do the right thing and apply some capabilities restrictions to processes. They wanted a little more than out of box security. That results in every company forming and modifying init scripts, changing the configuration paradigms, encoding config directly in or inventing their own new parameterization.

IMHO, any competent sysadmin, when is installing the system, would edit all those templates into the exact shape the system and the user needs. Those file are just that - templates. The fact that overworked company sysadmins started using templates as final configuration and needed something automated instead, doesn't mean that this systemd that is fit for them is also fit for everybody else.

by M95D

7/26/2026 at 6:31:03 PM

the systemd init system is complicated but fine. the problem with systemd is how much it wants your computer to itself. e.g. it can only run as PID 1, you aren't allowed to use control groups if you use systemd, it overwrites resolv.conf with its own address, it renames all your network adapters to lennart's preference (he calls them stable names but anyone who actually uses a computer will tell you they change more often now), and it binds itself to syslog

by inigyou

7/26/2026 at 6:25:52 PM

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

by vrighter

7/26/2026 at 7:43:33 PM

I'm still using sysvinit without anything on top (the default would have been sysvinit + openrc, but I dropped openrc, too complicated for my needs). I find it a lot easier than learning systemd, or learning anything else. To find out what's going on, I just need to open one file: /etc/inittab, and it's all in there. Nothing hidden somewhere else. Nothing undocumented. Simple commands, one after another. There are no dependencies, no conditions, not unless I put them there myself.

by M95D

7/26/2026 at 12:29:42 PM

Maybe, but the scale of systemd features is humongous. It better be well documented. You don't need a user manual for hammer, you do need one for hydraulic press.

by po1nt

7/26/2026 at 12:31:14 PM

> hydraulic press

What is there to know? It goes up and down, and don't stick your arm inside...

by nubinetwork

7/26/2026 at 8:02:50 PM

You'd be surprised to know.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3389176/Cincinnati-90-Form...

by M95D

7/26/2026 at 3:24:35 PM

Until it breaks, reports error, leaks, makes weird sound, needs a maintenance or even if you want to move it. You need to know how heavy it is, where are mounting points, where is the center of gravity, what needs to be affixed etc. What is the power it draws for the pump, what is the peak power and how long is the peak, what is the power factor? Does it have a safety certification, what kind of training operator needs, are safety elements up to date to modern standard? What kind of fire extinguisher do you need? What is the toxicity of all the materials under normal and extreme conditions? What kind of peak force is applied to floor and how is it distributed?

by po1nt

7/26/2026 at 2:03:52 PM

The scale is humongous? Syszemd is not one big thing. It's a collection of small things, each meticoulsouy documented and you can pick and choose.

If you still think there is only one Systemd, maybe learn about the tool instead of just talking others after their mouth.

by 7bit

7/26/2026 at 3:29:24 PM

Just the PID 1 manager is multiple times larger in LoC than any alternative. There is no metric in which systemd is more lightweight that I could find.

by po1nt

7/26/2026 at 9:11:36 PM

I'm not sure this is true in practice, if we're counting init scripts themselves. Which we should, because init scripts are code and they often re-implement standard systemd features. Usually in wonky, broken ways.

by preg_match

7/26/2026 at 2:14:00 PM

that's wrong in the sense it won't be useful for anything unless you have a dozen of those small things setup in the very specific way the author envisioned you set them up.

you seem to be repeating all the marketing, while mentioning in other comments you never understood any init system. i don't think you're the authority to be adding so many comments here.

by iririririr

7/26/2026 at 5:08:47 PM

Yes, systemd not being a monolith is a myth.

You can forward logs to rsyslog or something, but you really can't disable systemd-journald. Technically you don't need to run systemd-boot, you can use grub or something else, but then bootctl and systemd kexec stop working. You don't need to run dbus, but if you don't several systemd features break, and it's not even documented what needs it. The list goes on and on.

Also, the fact that all components are in the same repository and need to be built together causes a lot of headaches with packaging due to dependency cycles (like, systemd -> cryptsetup -> lvm2 -> udev -> systemd).

by rnhmjoj

7/26/2026 at 9:13:28 PM

Systemd is literally not a monolith because it's not one big piece of software. It's a collection of software. For example, systemd-boot has basically nothing to do with systemd-init.

Yes, some software is more tightly coupled than others, naturally. systemd-init and systemd-journald work tightly together because logging is a core requirement of any init system.

by preg_match

7/26/2026 at 1:56:31 PM

Well, in my experience, systemd has much worse documentation, is very inconsistent (or you could say it is constistantly brain-dead), and extremely unreliable and unpredictable, since it often hangs when shutting down and rebooting.

by dosisking

7/26/2026 at 9:14:56 PM

In my experience hangs usually happen from no time limits on units or excessively long time limits. I fried a NIC a while back and network-manager-wait-online has no time limit. Usually this isn't a problem, but the NIC was fried in a very unique way where it would continuously try to connect and then downgrade connections.

The bright side is this is all logged, trivially grep-able, and easy to fix.

by preg_match

7/26/2026 at 2:03:36 PM

systemd is like the registry. If you drink the koolaid and fully admit and adopt the decisions made, you’ll do ok, perhaps even good.

If you have 20+ years of experience, you’ll will NEVER get it to work the way you expect, might as well install Gentoo.

by bombcar

7/26/2026 at 1:34:11 PM

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 - pretty much all logic in ruby and .yml files. Literally my whole system is described via .yml files, ruby then just auto-expands all of this into what is meaningful. I also compile from source and manage the system via ruby as-is, so I don't even need systemd, nor shell scripts. But this is just one comment here and if you refer to shell scripts then I agree with you - shell scripts have always been horrible. I fail to see why we should like systemd merely because shell scripts are so awful. That makes no sense. I neither use systemd nor shell scripts (ok ok I bail ... I am currently using manjaro which uses systemd; I disabled most of the services, but the primary reason I was assimilated into systemd is mostly because the non-systemd linux distributions, kind of gave up for the most part or come with their own set of problems - slackware, void and so forth. And yeah, I was using and testing them for ages too, slackware I used for many, many years. It is still a great distribution but it is not really active anymore. No new .iso releases in years, sorry, that is dead. Even if Patrick still updates packages.)

The other part is ... IF you referred to an alternative init system, then THAT comparison is flawed too, because sysvinit is mostly just an init system. Systemd is some giant thing that does 100000 things. So the comparison is, and ALWAYS has been, unfair. Not the same things are compared here.

by shevy-java

7/26/2026 at 1:39:34 PM

Systemd is not 1 giant thing that does 100000 things - it is a collection or 10000 services doing 10000 things, integrating amongst themselves where practical. You need not use networkd, logind, resolved or any other one piece of the system you dislike.

by eptcyka

7/26/2026 at 2:37:16 PM

My least favorite part is journald. When you find a way to rip that out, let me know.

Also logind is so hard to avoid that even other systems have ported it: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Elogind

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/26/2026 at 2:40:17 PM

> You most likely refer to sysinit or something like that, right? Because to what else do you compare it to? Shell scripts?

dinit is a good service manager that doesn't feel obligated to reinvent the kitchen sink

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/26/2026 at 3:59:44 PM

> Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

I dunno, "things not working the way I expect" is very subjective.

I personally think it makes more sense that processes do not outlive the parent from which they come (in this case processes spawned from a user shouldn't outlive that user) unless you explicitly go through something which outlive the parent (process manager in this case (e.g. running via systemd-run)).

Though I am also strongly of the opinion of just because something is a feature, does not mean it is good to keep around, e.g SUID/SGID (which has a similar "I get more than the parent" problem).

Though I guess different people can have different opinions/values on this.

by NekkoDroid

7/26/2026 at 1:34:01 PM

It's one of those systemd features that are annoying and in the way when you're trying to accomplish a specific task but deal well with shitware. To be fair to systemd, these features can't usually be implemented without writing new rules for what you have to do to accomplish the legitimate tasks.

by mike_hock

7/26/2026 at 12:26:51 PM

The fault lies in the distribution for it's default configuration, not systemd.

The article even mentions that distros ship with it turned off

by ChocolateGod

7/26/2026 at 2:41:17 PM

The fault lies in the upstream defaulting the option on, so that distros have to

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/26/2026 at 1:20:58 PM

> This is why i dislike systemd. Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

Even if the change is a genuine improvement?

by Someone

7/26/2026 at 1:52:14 PM

How can the change be a genuine improvement, if it does something unexpected that needs to be figured out?

by dosisking

7/26/2026 at 2:41:27 PM

This is not a genuine improvement:

> One of the features of systemd that is most controversial is the option to kill user processes when the user logs out. That initially killed screen/tmux/nohup processes too.

Killing processes that the user clearly did not want killed is a regression.

Reading the rest of article it seems that its fixed but made things a lot more complicated than "unless you deliberately start things so that they keep running when you logout they will be killed when you logout". Am I wrong?

by graemep

7/26/2026 at 9:16:54 PM

I don't think it's a regression at all. It's been standard advice for decades that logout-login wipes user processes for updates, therefore you don't need to restart.

I'd argue the opposite is true: linger is surprising, and I turn it off.

by preg_match

7/26/2026 at 3:28:20 PM

I, for one, appreciate the honesty. I wish more systemd haters would admit this is why they dislike it. We could finally throw away the tired arguments that have been disproven in the past ten years

by halJordan

7/26/2026 at 1:37:51 PM

> Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

You must love SELinux

by nurettin

7/26/2026 at 12:44:18 PM

"The way you expect" is probably inconsistent and, upon closer inspection, completely broken.

There is a reason why systemd became the default and other niche init systems have faded into obscurity.

Sure, it may be more complex than your pile of shell scripts, but that's because it does the same things better, and has a lot more functionality that you will need at some point, and good luck replicating that by hacking shell scripts.

by qweqwe14

7/26/2026 at 2:43:17 PM

> "The way you expect" is probably inconsistent and, upon closer inspection, completely broken.

When I start a program, I want it to stay running. This is perfectly consistent and not broken.

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/26/2026 at 2:42:22 PM

You are framing this as the only choice being between systemd and shell scripts.

by graemep

7/26/2026 at 1:50:52 PM

> There is a reason why systemd became the default and other niche init systems have faded into obscurity.

Yes, it is part of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy

by dosisking

7/26/2026 at 2:17:03 PM

No, it is part of the "I just want stuff to work" strategy

by qweqwe14

7/26/2026 at 1:03:31 PM

> Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

Sound like you don't like computers to begin with

by dietr1ch

7/26/2026 at 1:48:03 PM

He probably just doesn't like having to use poorly written software

by dosisking

7/26/2026 at 2:03:17 PM

That's pretty much all software.

by BigTTYGothGF

7/26/2026 at 12:53:49 PM

I'm presumably missing something here. Why does tmux et al not work? Remotely? Ie you're logged in locally and remotely to the same machine, log out locally which kills everything running remotely, but then why would you log in twice like that?

And that being the case can systemd not just only close everything when your logins reach 0?

by benj111

7/26/2026 at 12:59:01 PM

You can detach from screen/tmux, leave it running in the background, and log back in later to the same screen/tmux like you left it.

Except systemd can kill it when you log out, so you come back to nothing.

by tux3

7/26/2026 at 3:11:00 PM

What I don't get is why (on Arch) I have linger off yet have never had trouble with tmux/ zellij being killed.

Edit: ah, this post clears it up. Mentions linger has nothing to do with screen muxers, and also brings KillUserProcesses to peoples attention.

Damn systemd and its multiple levels of convenience.

by c-hendricks

7/26/2026 at 1:14:08 PM

Ah ok. Seems like the log out metaphor is kind of broken then?

It seems to me if you want persistence between logouts, the processes should belong to a different group/user.

(I'm spitballing hypotheticalshere, not saying anyone/thing in particular is wrong)

by benj111

7/26/2026 at 1:36:34 PM

Think about user services in a multi-user setup

Do you want user-level services, or a multi-tenant system-level service? - Who can tweak the service configuration? - How do you ensure there's no data leaks between users? - What about misbehaviour? Quotas, crashes

I think lingering is great here

by dietr1ch

7/26/2026 at 2:39:02 PM

Off the top of my head. Have a group that doesn't die on logout. So you can have an email Daemon that responds with out of office. And you tmux session can keep running?

I'm not necessarily talking about the Unix concept of a group. It seems to me you want some granularity between 'kill all processes' and 'keep all processes'

by benj111