[CentOS] Just need to vent

Mon Jan 25 13:59:07 UTC 2016
Sylvain CANOINE <sylvain.canoine at tv5monde.org>

> I believe that RHEL7 (and CentOS7) both have systemd integrated into them enough
> that it isn’t as simple as “choose init system” on install.

That's because of systemd. Even if most of the linux distros don't, giving the choice is a bit less difficult with any other init system.

The main problem is systemd makes (often badly) more and more things that, as a "simple" init system, it should not do (login, and "su-ing" now, journaling, device management via udev, and so on), violating the KISS principle. If you use systemd, you have to use all the systemd tentacles, even if you don't want. Worse, more and more programs hardly depend on systemd now. Gnome 3 is an example, and that's why I don't, and won't, use Gnome 3.

I don't use any systemd-based distro personally. Sadly, professionally, I have to, since RedHat/CentOS and Debian adopted it (and Ubuntu LTS will do soon). And systemd makes my job uselessly more complicated. For exemple, why must I deal with journald and its fancies when I setup a syslog server (and I have to, because journald don't even know what are centralized logs...) on my servers ? Why systemd maintainers continuously change big parts of its behaviour, without any consideration of major-minor versionning, and why RedHat/CentOS maintainers dismiss this fact (the CentOS 7.1 to 7.2 update is painful, because systemd switched from 208 to 219) ? Why, more generally, the answer is often "systemd" when I encounter a problem on a server ?

Sylvain.
Pensez ENVIRONNEMENT : n'imprimer que si ncessaire