by b112 | 2026-02-26 06:53:17+00:00
The only plus for Amutable, is that it may finally cause a sane systemd fork.

My immense, strong suspicion here, is that they believe they can use their control over the systemd project, to add immense layers of code and change, to support Amutable's needs.

When this happens, there will likely be pushback of some sort. I'm hoping a fork will happen at that time, and even better, hoping that maybe the project can go someplace saner.

Getting rid of all tcp support (eg, systemd providing inetd functionality) from an init system would be an excellent start. The absurdity of pid 1 having networking hooks is absolutely madness.

Splitting start/stop ordering would be an additional benefit.

Removing all daemons, and all support code, and forking them (for legacy support) would be next. No horribly enacted timesyncd, or resolvd.

Dropping the absurd journal and returning to a syslog solution would be next. Literal kiddie town, to have no centralized logging as a default when first created. There are now attempts to entirely re-skin the cat, with systemd-journal-gatewayd, yet every single appliance and piece of hardware supports... that's right, syslog protocol, not systemd's proprietary journalling protocol or formats.

There is so much about systemd that is just about re-writing the entire universe, not for immense gain, not for immense improvement, but instead for the tiniest, smallest shred of edge-case betterment, and meanwhile, creating massive, overwhelming denigration of every other aspect of that same use case.

Has the journal improved anything for anyone, anywhere, in any real, meaningful way? Absolutely not. All searching, etc is available on text files with | grep. Zero improvement.

Has the journal improved performance? No.

And the ridiculous and absurd and inane concept of the journal being removed at each reboot?

It's as if the people writing systemd, had absolutely no real-world experience with servers, maintaining them, or working with them, and simply made design decisions predicated upon rumour, with no actual understanding of edge cases, or why things are, or were, as they are.

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An example would be some aspects of Hyundais. They are relatively new, in many ways, to much of the market they have entered. Yes, I know, decades may not seem like that, but it is so. And until they stole all of Toyota's QA methods by hiring engineers (which also took all documentation), they were of horrible quality.

That said, I say in one of their newer SUVs, electric, the other day. Their dashboard, down at the bottom, ended in a sharp corner. When I sat in the car, I realised that should I be in an accident, or even brake aggressively, my kneecap would mash into this non-rounded, extremely square, sharp angle. I could literally see my kneecap being sliced/popped off.

This sort of "it's silly to have round everywhere, let's do something new ascetically, and make it a sharp edge down there!", coupled with "There aren't many people 6'3" in S. Korea, so we'll never notice how dangerous this is", is a prime example of this.

The authors had no idea of edge cases, and the litany of bug reports over the last decade has shown all their supposed improvements filed away, as they have basically had to conform to logical design standards, developed by people far wiser than they, over the last half century.

No, someone-new-to-the-entire-unix-ecosystem, the phrase "but we can just" isn't a viable means to determine sensible design methodology.

Go ahead, enact change, just make sure it makes some sense.