Tobias Hunger

Yeap, you now get logs from all stages of the boot process, and you notice logs going bad or getting manipulated. It’s a huge step forward for Linux, especially for people that look at logs every day. They can finally trust the logs to be correct and complete.

And it is not even a change: I have never had real unix servers with plain text logs in 30 years working with them. Proper computers have always stored logs in databases or whatever. That’s actually a legal requirement in many parts of the world for many kinds of servers.

Just use a distribution that uses the init system you want to test by default. The init system is a pretty central piece of infrastructure in todays unix, ditsributions need to invest a lot of effort to make it work well. The default init system always works better than any other options a distribution offers (if they even over options).

There are significant security/reliability improvements all over the place. E…g. logind actually works as promissed, which none of the clones do as they can not have the necessary infrastructure that is provided by other parts of systemd. Or udev using systemd-pid1 to start services: That fixes a well documented problem with udev starting services itself – which most non-systemd distributions do till today. Problems do notngo away by ignoring them.

Checkout non-systemd distros, most of them still use group based access to devices a user needs to run wayland. Of course that does not matter at all for X11, security is so poor there anyway.

These comparisons assume the systems do the same thing, resulting in a comparable system once everything is up and running.

That is just not the case. Systemd does a ton more wrt. security, hardening and reliability. E.g. it has udev integrated and not running “stand-alone” since it tends to lock itself up when it needs to start long-running services in response to HW showing up. Yes that happens rarely but there is nothing you can do about it. Logind locks down permissions to HW way more tightly than the “forks” that have the same problems that the pre-logind system had – and that led to logind getting developed in the first place. Lots of sandboxing options are built into systemd and widely used to run services (I rarely saw any sandboxing elsewhere so far out of the box), measured boot is pretty much a systemd-only thing at this time, … .

How does systemd dare to provide useful functionality? It should be just as useless as all the other inits that nobody ever felt the need to depend on, simply because they do nothing interesting.

You can just build a way more functional and secure system with all the cool features systemd provides.