I have recently been exposed to a lot of stuff against systemd.
I know its an old debate that has inflamed people for a long time, I am not looking into restarting it as I never took a stance into it in the past anyway.
I am myself a almost 30+ years power user of Linux and I have never used systemd much myself since it never fixed any issues I had with the previous approaches, and since I am a good user of Gentoo, always loved the freedom to just keep using OpenRC and din’t ever bother with systemd.
I like the Unix approach and at the same time, if it is not broken don’t fix it, is my basic idea. So my approach to systemd has been not of dislike, rather of I don’t care, I don’t need it. And I never needed it anyway.
After reading trough most of the links below I start to think that maybe my stance could be more than simple technical.
What are other lemmy-ers idea on all this?
I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the Linux Foundation either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.
TLDR: I don’t dislike systemd, I never cared about systemd. Do I need to start caring now due to all this non technical issues?
(The following is a post on the #libreware telegram channel on the 7th/8th of February 2025)
Lennart Poettering intends to replace “sudo” with #systemd’s run0. Here’s a quick PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploiting the fact “systemd-run” (the basis of uid0/run0, the sudo replacer) creates a user owned pty for communication with the new “root” process.
This isn’t the only bug of course, it’s not possible on Linux to read the environment of a root owned process but as systemd creates a service in the system slice, you can query D-BUS and learn sensitive information passed to the process env, such as API keys or other secrets.
https://fixupx.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559
Nitter mirror: https://xcancel.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559
Here are some links about #systemd #alternatives for #Linux in no particular order. Which are your favorite alternatives and distros?
https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/
https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html
https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/
https://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html
https://the-world-after-systemd.ungleich.ch/
https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=120652
https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/
https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom
https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/linux-systemd-exploit.html
https://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/systemd-it-keeps-getting-worse/
https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/why.php
Some more added here too: https://start.me/p/Kg8keE/priv-sec
#systemd #Linux
Systemd has more features than old SysV init scripts. Particularly around detecting events and taking actions such as starting firewalls when joining networks, turning on battery tools when unplugged from a charger, starting new services when connected to a dock etc.
The other things it does, it does more reliably than sysV init scripts. It starts services concurrently, provides a profiler to improve start up time, contains much less code, provides better security to tapping into the container features of Linux.
Security is actually where Systemd has troubles generally. It has more CVE tgan all other init together. And reliability (esp. starting order of services) is another weak point.
Anyway what you describe is done at DBUS level which has nothing to do with an init system. I do have DBUS and works just fine as it would with OpenRC or SystemD either.
SystemD doesn’t really help with all that, with OpenRC never had issues with that.