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229

When people complain about systemd "violating the unix philosophy", this is what they actually mean (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

65 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Credit for the answer used in the right panel: https://serverfault.com/a/841150

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Is it r-unit, or run-it?

I've read it as r-unit for so long and now I've only just realised that run-it makes far more sense

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

lol I've been pronouncing nginx as "enn-jinx" for so long before I learned that it was "engine-ex".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Someone is asking the important questions

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Runit, making systems easily pwnable since 2004 🎉

Step 1: Make a system service run as root
Step 2: Give service a runlevel that starts it at boot
Step 3: Make the file modifiable by a normal user
Step 4: ???
Step 5: pwned

Wow much philosopy. Is great. Incredible chievement. Very pressive!

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I'm using Debian without ever having been involved in the init-wars. What's wrong with Systemd and why should i not use it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

If you've never had a reason to not use it, then it's fine to continue using it. Systemd has been shown to be more or less stable, fast, and secure. The reason I don't like it is because it makes simple things really complicated. Some examples:

The meme
u/[email protected] example with sshd
Distros that use systemd init also seems to prefer using other systemd components as well. So you can get caught in weird situations where one task is spread across two different systems (e.g. systemd timers vs cron, systemd-elogind vs acpid)

If none of these sound familiar, then switching to a non-systemd distro likely won't make your life easier. But if you do, then it might be worth considering.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'd like to know too, a ELI5 version if possible. Somethingsomething monolithic, but what does that actually mean for me as an end user?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In my personal opinion, correct me if I'm wrong:

Systemd was created to replace the init system, then through extreme scope creep took over way more than wanted and needed, the main developer was "problematic" to say it politically correct, and in practice it has over complicated many super easy tasks to the point that I hate it. Other init systems were intuitive, systemd is all but.

Few weeks ago I setup a systemd server ssh server. Changing the port would be 5 seconds in changing a line in the sshd config, but now with the new and improved systemd I need to follow some nightmare documentation into creating systemd files in unrelated places and reload configs or something and I'm done with it

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Gonna be honest, never heard of running before this. Briefly considered switching before OPs presentation in the comments turned me off. I don't want to associate with his/ her mind of weirdo, they aren't fun.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What on earth did I do to offend you this much?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Were you not being serious when you were calling people systemd-bots?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I was being serious, but I'm not calling everyone who uses sytemd a bot. It has its merits, I use it on my homeserver (NixOS). When I say "systemd bot" I mean "people who blindly dismiss valid criticism of systemd". Same as when some people say "russian bot" they mean "troll who is paid to advocate for the actions of russian government", and not "everyone from russia is a bot".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Fair enough. Can't say I know enough to really decide what is or isn't valid criticism.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for posting your original comment btw, now that I read over my own comments I do realise that it comes across as very hostile and a little silly, regardless of intention.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

No, thank you for being so reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I'm not yet convinced that "violating the unix philosophy" is a bad thing. I'm not saying that it's not, I don't have a defined opinion about this yet

[–] [email protected] -5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

systemd is for the weak. red hat and lennart are just shit.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I don't support calling people who volunteer their time to develop free software "just shit", but I can't help but agree at least a little bit about redhat. Redhat is kind of like Richard Nixon: if you just assume that eveything you dislike is their fault, you would be right surprisingly often.

"Predictable" interface naming
avahi
dbus

That being said, they did also contribute to a lot of kickass software, from btrfs to Firefox to linux namespaces to qemu to pipewire, as well as to software that you can't really live without like glibc or gdb. So I guess the converse also holds: if you just assume that everything you like is there thanks to redhat, you would be correct pretty often as well. Can't really say that about Nixon though.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago

hitler built the autobahn. enough to not call him shit? doubt that.

what lennart and red hat have done is just terrible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Guys I only used SystemD and I didn’t know you could use anything else lol stop hating I never had any problems!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago

Big news (from 2017): debian held back software features because someone doesn't like the new way of doing things. Let's blame systemd for this unprecedented case.

What's wrong with giving access to the specific sudo command, as suggested in the other answers?

[–] [email protected] 86 points 6 months ago (2 children)

When you hate something so much you have to find weird corner cases to support your views. Even then the way described isn’t how someone who knows that they are doing would do.

The best way for an unprivileged user to manage a service is for that user to run it. That way you inherit the correct permissions / acls / selinux contexts.

The command to do so is:

systemctl --user start the_service.service

[+] [email protected] -9 points 6 months ago (4 children)

have to find weird corner cases

Lol. Lmao even. I needed to do this because I wanted to learn the miryoku keyboard layout , and I wanted a way to quickly switch between Miryoku and standard QWERTY. The best way to do this that I could come up with was to bind a special key on my keyboard to toggle kmonad on and off. So I wrote a service for kmonad and gave my user permission to manage it. Running kmonad as my user wouldn't work, because kmonad needs root to create a virtual input device.

Luckily, I am running Void, so the solution was a single well-documented command. Out of curiosity I decided to take a look at what this would look like on systemd distros, leading to this meme. Honestly, I had to do a double take by the time the guy started talking about Javascript.

I feel kind of useless typing this out because you're just gonna ignore it anyway. In my post, I am talking about needing to do X. Your response is "why are you doing X, you should do Y". Why am I not surprised that you're a systemd user? Do you also use Gnome by any chance?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Wait, aren't most desktop environment support switching keyboard layout these days? For example, gnome can do that with super+space or via the language switcher in the top bar. Using a user service to do this seems overkill.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Miryoku isn't a regular layout. It has things like keys that change what they do depending on whether you tap them or hold them. Maybe it's theoretically possible to implement it as a standard XKB layout, but it would not be fun. Usually, Miryoku is implemented in your keyboard firmware. But if your keyboard doesn't support flashing custom firmware (e.g. builtin laptop keyboard), then you have to use a software solution like kmonad, which is a daemon that has to run as root.

As a sidenote, even for some "standard" keyboard layouts there needs to be background process. For example, Chinese and Japanese have too many characters to fit on a keybaord, so they use something called an Input Method Editor. But those usually don't need root, in contrast to kmonad.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Your response is "why are you doing X, you should do Y"

Because they're right, you shouldn't do X. I know that's not a satisfying answer for most people to hear, but it's often one people need to hear.

If the process must run as root, then giving a user direct and unauthenticated control over it is a security vulnerability. You've created a quick workaround for your issue, and to be clear it is unlikely to realistically cause you problems individually, but on a larger scale that becomes a massive issue. A better solution is required rather than recommend everybody create a hole in their security like yours in order to do this thing.

If this is something that unprivileged users reasonably want to control, then this control should be possible unprivileged, or at least with limited privilege, not by simply granting permanent total control of a root service.

This is ultimately an upstream issue more than anything else.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

and I wanted a way to quickly switch between Miryoku and standard QWERTY. The best way to do this that I could come up with was to bind a special key on my keyboard to toggle kmonad on and off.

You couldn't think of to use layers?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Well that would require learning the kmonad config syntax, and I was just looking for a quick solution... but yeah, adding a QWERTY layer is a better solution in the long term, I'll probably do that some time

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hey. There is no reason to feel useless. Everyone has value. And the best part about Linux is that we all can make our own choices. If people hate systemd they don’t have to use it. That’s ok. Void linux I think is actually a pretty cool distro. It reminds me of the BSDs for some reason.

I use systemd because I like how it works and I think it’s well designed. As for desktops I am a huge fan of sway. Gnome isn’t bad on a laptop or tablet though. What do you use?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm on bspwm right now, but I've been thinking of switching to wayland (in particular, hyprland). I've got nothing against gnome BTW. I have a friend with one of those laptops that turns into a tablet by flipping the keyboard to the back, and he also says Gnome is the only DE that "just works" for touchscreen, even though he uses KDE on his main laptop and desktop.

How are things on wayland by the way? From what I understand, it has partial support for running X11 apps, right? Do you use any X11 apps, or were you able to find wayland-native counterparts for everything?

[void] reminds me of the BSDs for some reason

I've heard this comparison a lot, though I don't know what it means, since I've never used BSD haha. Maybe I should give BSD a try sometime.

And the best part about Linux is that we all can make our own choices

Amen to that!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

How are things on wayland by the way? From what I understand, it has partial support for running X11 apps, right? Do you use any X11 apps, or were you able to find wayland-native counterparts for everything?

Most of the time, you wouldn't even notice if an app is using xwayland or native wayland... except for apps written with electron/chromium embedded framework (chromium, steam client, spotify, vscode, etc). They're pretty glitchy on xwayland so you'll have to figure out if they accept arguments to use wayland natively, but not all of them support wayland natively yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

That's good to hear. I try to avoid electron apps (I just use the website version instead), but thanks for the tip anyway!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

What if multiple users have to manage that service?

Edit: nvrmnd, pretty sure the runnit solution won't allow this either, your answer is correct. What about while the service is already running? Wouldn't your solution require a restart?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

A generic stack overflow answer:

Do you REALLY need multiple users to manage that service? Maybe it's better to have multiple instances of that service and.... (This goes on and on)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

pretty sure the runnit solution won’t allow this either

I'm no expert, but I think you could make a special group, set the supervise directory to be owned by that group, and add all relevant users to that group? Either way, as I explained in a different reply, running the service as a user vs letting that user control a root service are completely different things, and one is not always a substitute for the other.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If the service is already running it has to be stopped as a system service and run as a user service. In order to ensure that the service inherits all the correct permissions / acls / se linux policies the service needs to be launched from the limited permissions context.

With the systemd approach you’re not just passing a control handle around. You’re ensuring the process is running under an appropriate security context.

If you want to let multiple users manage the user systems service, I would probably go with sudo and systemd user files. You could create a group which has sudo access etc. The important idea is that an unprivileged user controls an unprivileged service.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

With the systemd approach

What about this makes it "the systemd approach"? runit supports user services too. These are just two different tasks that are needed in different contexts. Sometimes what you need is to "pass a control handle around" to a privileged service. And sometimes you need to actually make a service unprivileged.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I'm out of the loop. The answer that references "one person's personal opinion" is from 2017, and the context it links to is from 2016. Surely things have changed since then, right?

.. Right?

(I'm genuinely asking, I've got no idea)

Edit: I just checked on Linux Mint 21.3. It's still on the same version as back then, 0.105. Well, Debian is nothing if not sable!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Bookworm looks to be on version 122, so as downstream distros update to newer Debian versions, it should be updated now

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Mint 21.3 is based on Debian Bookworm (via Ubuntu 22.04, not counting LMDE of course). I don't know what you're looking at and I also don't fully know how this works, but what you said doesn't seem to be the case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Ubuntu 22.04 is long before Bookworm

It looks like Ubuntu pulled in Bookworm’s version in 23.10

If Mint is sticking to LTS Ubuntu versions, it will get it whenever it rebases on top of Ubuntu 24.04

Edit: Debian (Bookworm) polkitd version 122: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/polkitd

Ubuntu 22.04 polkitd version 105: https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/polkitd

Ubuntu 24.04 pre-release polkitd version 124: https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/polkitd

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Very well, you seem to definitely know this stuff better than me! I based my comment on this answer and getting this myself on Mint 21.3:

$ cat /etc/debian_version 
bookworm/sid

But reading a bit closer, I think this is the key part:

That's how, for example, Ubuntu 20.04, released in April 2020, can be based on Debian 11 "Bullseye", which was released in August 2021.

So Ubuntu probably pulled Bookworm before it was released, and before it upgraded policykit. But it's still to some extent based on Bookworm. Does that sound right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah, Ubuntu pulls in the development version of Debian

“Sid” is the unstable name for Debian - where packages are being tested for the next release

Debian Bookworm was released 2023

Ubuntu LTS and Debian have tended to release on a two year cadence offset by a year

Debian Stretch (2017)
Ubuntu 18.04 (2018)
Debian Buster (2019)
Ubuntu 20.04 (2020)
Debian Bullseye (2021)
Ubuntu 22.04 (2022)
Debian Bookworm (2023)
Ubuntu 24.04 (2024)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

lol, I didn't even attempt to read the full thing. But now you made me curious.

But only curious. I don't feel smart enough to read and comprehend the entire thing.

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