Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective

When writing software, it’s comparatively easy to come up with grand new ideas and turn them into lines of code and files filled with modules. What’s much harder is (1) to expand ones code without coupling everything together (2) present it in a persuasive way that naturally builds a user base. SystemD feels like the new grad hire who decided the first thing the would do after joining — the opening power play — is to convince the PHB we…

Systemd pissed off many people. For me and most users, the transition was fully imperceptible. With the difference that systemctl tools seem to work better for what it does than the many sparse different tools it replaced.

https://archive.is/FMfu4 > Perhaps as BPF subsumes Linux into making it a managed-runtime hybrid kernel with subsystems becoming increasingly componentized and instrumented (with early signs in the proposal to add Linux Security Module hooks to BPF programs), as pidfd/process descriptors allow for reliable supervision to be distributed across self-contained processes, as the native Linux mount API becomes more event-driven on its own, and as a generation of Rust fanatics in their undying religious zeal insist that…