I worked for a bank. When they decided to deploy Linux on their infrastructure, they chose RHEL and they have signed a big contract with RedHat for tech support.
Overall, they chose RedHat for the same reason they chose Microsoft before: tech support. They have >10000 engineers, and yet somehow they think they absolutely need tech support… They pay a lot for it. In my building, they even got a Microsoft engineer once a week on-site until Covid. I don’t know for the other people working for this bank, but I asked for Microsoft support only once in 2 years. In the end, their guy sent me back an email telling me “I’ve transmitted your question to the corresponding engineering team” and … diddlysquat.
Now to be fair, for paying customers, RHEL and Microsoft both ensure security updates for a really a long time. Red Hat pays a lot of people to backport security patches from upstream to previous versions. It allows companies like the bank I worked for to keep running completely crappy and obsolete software for an insane amount of time without having to worry too much about security vulnerabilities.
Anyway regarding RedHat contributions, a lot of them are subtle.
A friend of mine works for RedHat. He is a core Python developer and is paid full-time by RedHat to work on Python.
Through this friend, I applied for a position in their company at some point (unfortunately, it didn’t happen ; don’t remember why exactly). The position was in a team dedicated to improve hardware support. They have built an infrastructure to let computer manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo, etc) test the compatibility of their new hardware with Linux/RHEL quickly and automatically.
Part of the technical support they provide to some clients is “making things work”. It may imply fixing bugs or improving drivers and then sending patches upstream.
If I’m not mistaken, they paid Lennart Poettering to work on Systemd and Pulseaudio.
They pay for the development of some infrastructure software like Corosync for instance.
This list is far from exhaustive. I’m sure they have paid for a lot of other things you’re using daily without knowing it.
RH will just cut them out soon enough, if you believe the trends.
Best have a plan to move on FROM them, though. Look into parallel porting to PCLinuxOS for now, as it’s a VERY similar maintenance routine, and it has a very wide app support window. Their unattended install (ie packer for vagrant or ovirt) is absolute ass, but that’s their achilles heel. Ultimately, that may not be a problem for you.
I’d direct you to the PCL/OS lemmy sub, but I think there is none yet.
You’re not doing it right. There’s absolutely a reason why enterprise linux works with a version that’s more-or-less locked in place (but for security updates, like a maintenance fork). You need to understand the value you’ve been overlooking.
ten years of a stable platform. Because, yeah, it’s not this week’s release with the glitter, but it’s also not a moving target of broken suck you have to constantly chase, and you can actually do dev.
dependencies are figured out
updates are trivial when security stuff comes out. Honestly – yum+cron is so stable and reliable, and the compatibility is part of the guarantee; so you - and your customers - don’t have to worry or - please god no - delay updates to gauge risk. Since updates are 99% of the work to avoid exploits, this goes from ‘huge risk’ to ‘no-brainer’. And you don’t have to worry that your dev environment is non-trivial to replicate on the daily.
your requirements for your software becomes ‘EL7’; maybe ‘EL7+EPEL7’ or so. Your installation process becomes ‘add repo RPM which pulls in other repo RPMs. yum install’ , and you’re already onto mere config work.
validating the install isn’t ‘did you install this ream of apps from this particular week in time, then run some wget|sh bullshit? Now run this other set of commands to confirm your installation’ – but in our case is just ‘rpm -qa|egrep’ or even an snmpwalk.
not working? Give me your one config file and your rpm-qa and we’ll replicate here trivially and find out why. (I didn’t work in support, but I liaised with them a bunch in the security work, and that was common practice) Tossing 4 lines and a <<EOF construct into a vagrant config is just so easy, now, and gives the entire machine to play with.
As someone who used to dev a notable app in the past, cross-distro problems alone made so many of the fringe OSes impossible to support, and so we didn’t. EL was the backbone because we respected what we had.
I just can’t figure out why this-week’s-glitter is more important than losing the install/support/update/validate burden by choosing a stable platform to work within. Life’s too short to support dependency hell or struggle just to replicate a failing setup in your lab for testing. Do you just not support customers?
Ok, so I have a very unique background in systemd. I worked at Red Hat supporting it basically as the primary support and I’ve worked with the developers of systemd at Red Hat directly. I no longer work there.
So first off, it’s “systemd” all lower case. I don’t care, but for some reason Lennart Pottering (creator) does.
systemd was a MASSIVE change. And Red Hat did a TERRIBLE job relaying it. To the point where I’m still trying to get my company to understand that it can NOT be treated like the old init systems. You can NOT just drop an init script in place and walk away and hope it works. Because a LOT of times it doesn’t. Due to forks, switch users, etc.
systemd is NOT an init system. RHEL 5 and older had sysvinit as it’s init systemd. RHEL 6 had UpStart as it’s init system and looked exactly like sysvinit that no one even noticed. systemd again is NOT an init system. Init system is 1 part of systemd. systemd does a lot of cool things. It bundles applications together, it manages those applications and can restart them or kill children, it can do resource constraints, it separates out users from the system, and lots more.
Because it is not an init system there is a LOT LOT LOT of bad recommendations out on the internet where someone has X problem and person suggests Y and IT WORKS! … except it doesn’t REALLY work as far as systemd is concerned and you’ll hit other issues or your application takes longer to start or stop and people just blame systemd.
It is systemd’s fault that it has done an ATROCIOUS job of helping people adapt. It’s a great example of RTFM. systemd’s man pages are INCREDIBLE and extensive, but when you drop so much knowledge it becomes more difficult to find what you want/need. systemd.index and systemd.directives are your best bet.
So systemd does a lot of amazing things that sysvinit never attempted to do. It’s never attempted to explain anything it expects everyone just learn magically. it’s INCREDIBLY complex, but once you understand it’s basics you can more easily get an application running, but as soon as there’s a problem it’ll just break your brain.
To give you an example, sshd’s old init script is like 250 lines of bash. systemd’s unit file comparative is like 12. Because systemd handles a LOT of what you manually had to handle before. BUT to get to that 12 you literally have to learn EVERYTHING new.
There is no “is it good or bad” here really imo. It’s a completely different fundamental design. Red Hat made it for themselves. Other distros picked it up. It can be argued that lots of folks followed Debian and Debian had a few Red Hat board members that were pushing it. Whether they pushed it of their own accord or because they were with Red Hat I don’t have a clue.
What I can say is at my current company they’re suffering from a LOT of systemd issues and they don’t even realize it. I’ve been working with Red Hat to try to get Insights to alert people to the failures and we’re making progress.
To see if you have issues just to start run the two following commands:
If you have any units that are failed, investigate those. If you don’t need them, disable them. As for the systemd-cgls this shows HOW systemd is grouping things. ANY application that runs as a service (or daemon or application or runs in the background or however you wanna say it) should be under system.slice. ONLY humans logging into the system (meat bags NOT applications switching to users) should be in user.slice. A LOT of times what happens is an old init script is dropped in place, they start it, it has a switch user and systemd assumes it’s a user and puts it into user.slice. systemd does NOT treat anything in user.slice the same as in system.slice and this WILL eventually cause problems.
So again, is it good or bad? Eh. It does a lot of cool things, but they did a MASSIVE disservice to ALL of us by just expecting to relearn absolutely EVERYTHING.
sshd’s init script under OpenRC is 87 lines, of which around half are blanks, comments, closing braces, and other boilerplate. Granted, that still makes the real code maybe three times the size of your systemd unit file, but the difference isn’t as impressive as you’re making out.
95% of people shouldn’t need to poke around in their init scripts or unit files anyway. If you actually need to do that, your use case is already somewhat unusual.
As an end user, unless you’re running a server, then no you shouldn’t have to mess with any of it.
If you’re running a server or a sysadmin you absolutely 100% should be paying attention. Almost every single vendor I’ve seen selling their applications only have initscripts. Which then cause issues. I’ve gone to the vendors and told them and they’ve said go to Red Hat. Well Red Hat doesn’t support that vendor’s init scripts.
Not naming an application, but it was from a BIG BLUE company and they said their only instructions are to call their script from the user. But it won’t remain running if you do that because systemd will close out the slice when the user logs out. SO it’s obvious they haven’t tried what they’re suggesting.
And I’m not attempting to state that systemd is impressive in any way. systemd basically took what had been building over 40 years of init scripting and threw it out the window and said our way is better. I don’t think it is. I’m just saying, with a directive based unit file it’ll be simpler to parse than a bash script.
Wayland gaming is great, especially on KDE, you can go into display settings/compositor and switch from smoother animation to lower latency for a latency that’s even lower than X11, without any of the X11 issues.
While I disagree with Red Hat’s decision to hinder source access, this move from Rocky (a commercial company!) seems even more disingenuous, imho.
Why on earth is it disingenuous? RedHat is openly stating its intent to violate the GPL. Rocky is telling them “good luck with that.” RedHat wants to be the only game in town providing service contracts. Rocky is saying “no thanks; we’re sticking around.”
Just try to implement user session management on a non systemd distro…
Systemd is way better than others init system. I’m using Alpine Linux on my phone and I really wait for a Fedora/Arch like PMOS project (it’s on the way)
pretty unpopular opinion i believe, but i loathe them. they feel like installing apps from the windows store, but worse. i use them on steam deck and my laptop, but they often fail to launch with no feedback[^1], won’t accept drag&dropped files, store their dotfiles in weird places, take up much more disc space (and therefore take literally almost 10x as long to download), won’t inherit the theme (i think because plasma stores the gtk theme in a non-standard place), etc. they feel like they’ve been designed to flout what os developers have built up over many decades and are just a struggle to use.
[^1]: on steam deck particularly (so i know it’s not a configuration i’ve screwed up) no flatpaks will launch unless i launch them twice. even after that, there’s a long delay (~1 minute) and then two instances launch. i know this sounds like i should just wait until the first one launches, but that doesn’t work
The Flatpak theming issue is really annoying, yeah. There’s a rather limited pool of GTK themes to choose from in Flathub, but as long as you’re running one of those themes in your DE (assuming GNOME or other GTK-based), themes will inherit. Can’t speak to KDE as I haven’t used Plasma as primary.
Other than that, Flatpak has been great. I use it reasonably heavily on a laptop that’s slower than a Steam Deck (Ryzen 5 3500u, 8GB DDR4, 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus) and haven’t run into performance issues on multiple distros — EndeavourOS, Pop!_OS, LMDE, Fedora, an early version of Vanilla OS, and most recently Debian 12. On my desktop I don’t feel a performance difference between Flatpak and native.
You can use about any laptop with Linux. I would say take a current laptop and boot into a distro using a live usb. This will let you try it without installing it. You do occasionally run into issues with some hardware: fingerprint, wifi, trackpad, etc. So this is a good test.
But otherwise if you want a laptop that guarantees Linux support: Framework, System76, Tuxedo
Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don’t know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.
Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.
It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.
All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.
While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system… no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.
I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering’s code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.
Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don’t know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.
Poettering is like Torvalds: gruff when pressed, but not wrong.
PulseAudio is like systemd: dramatically better than what came before, and the subject of a great deal of criticism with no apparent basis in reality.
PulseAudio did expose a lot of ALSA driver bugs early on. That may be the reason for its bad rap. But it’s still quite undeserved.
Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.
This is a nonsensical argument. Systemd is FOSS. It can and will be forked if that becomes necessary.
Which, in light of recent changes at Red Hat, seems likely to happen soon…
Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting.
That’s because fragmentation among fundamental components like sound servers and process supervisors results in a compatibility nightmare. You really want to go back to the bad old days when video games had to support four different sound servers and the user had to select one with an environment variable? Good riddance to that.
I want solutions to come from community and nice people
Then you’d best pack your bags and move to something other than Linux, because Linus Torvalds is infamous for his scathing (albeit almost invariably correct) rants.
Lol, not even close. I am not talking about being harsh for writing stupid code. Nor I want to go 20 years back to proove it to some random person, do it yourself.
Systemd is FOSS. It can and will be forked if
Yeah, the same way chrome can be forked. No, software developed like that - in closed room just source being dropped on to community, what happened with PA and SD in the begging no one wants to touch. Gentoo had big problems just maintaing eudev and elogind to enable gnome and some other software to work.
Luckily, it is not important anymore, there is pipewire so I managed to skeep PA completely.
Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
No it’s almost always been derived from people’s behinds.
Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
Yes.
Systemd is spectacular in many ways. Every modern OS has a process management system that can handle dependencies, schedule, manage restarts via policy and a lot more. Systemd is pretty sophisticated on that front. I’ve been able to get it to manage countless services in many environments with great success and few lines of code.
Speaking as someone who uses OpenRC on all my machines . . . no, systemd is not necessarily slow, and personally I don’t care about the speed of my init system anyway. Thing is, systemd also has nothing that makes it more useful to me than OpenRC, so I have no incentive to change. Plus, I dislike the philosophy behind it, the bloat, and the obnoxious behaviour the project showed when interacting with others in its early days. I’m a splitter, not a lumper, and systemd’s attempts to absorb All The Things strike me as rather . . . Windows-like.
So, in a technical sense I have no reason to believe that systemd is inferior to OpenRC + sysv, and it may be superior for some use cases which are not mine. I don’t spend a lot of time ranting about it, and I see no point in trying to convince people not to use it if it fits their needs. But I still won’t use it if I have another option.
I agree. SystemD is a great service daemon (or, sigh, unit daemon in the stupid parlance). I like unit file syntax and I like the ergonomics of systemctl. It’s solid and I appreciate the feeling of consistency that systemd lends to the otherwise chaotic landscape of Linux distrobutions.
It’s for this reason that I’m willing to forgive SystemD overstepping the boundaries of services somewhat. System init/mounting? Sure, that’s a blurry line after all. Logging? Okay – it does make sense to provide a single reliable solution if the alternative is dealing with dozens of different implementations. Network resolution & session management? Fine, I’ll begrudgingly accept that it’s convenient to be able to treat logins/networking as psuedo-services for the sake of dependencies.
If that’s as far as the scope crept, SystemD and I would be cool, but the so-called “component” list just keeps on going. SystemD has no business being a boot manager, nor a credential manager, nor a user manager, nor a container manager, nor an NTP client. I understand why they can’t deprecate most of this junk, but why can’t they just at least make this cruft optional to install?
Systemd (PID1) is not your boot manager, network deamon, resolver, user manager or ntp service.
Those are entirely independent deamons that happen to be developed under the systemd project umbrella but can be exchanged for equivalent components.
Tkey are gully optional.
In many cases, the systemd project’s one is one of the best choices though, especially when used with other systemd-developed components.
In some cases, there is no other viable choice because the systemd-* is just better and nobody wants to deal with something worse.
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