The Linux Community's Consensus on the 'systemd Sucks' Debate
Description
A three-panel stick figure comic illustrating a social interaction within the Linux community. In the first panel, a lone stick figure yells 'systemd sucks!!' towards a small crowd of other figures. Several members of the crowd are branded with the logos of popular Linux distributions that use systemd: openSUSE (green chameleon), Fedora (blue 'f'), Ubuntu (orange circle of friends), and Arch Linux (blue stylized 'A'). In the second panel, the lone figure is now silent, and a character from the crowd extends an absurdly long arm to give them a condescending thumbs-up, as if to placate them. In the final panel, the crowd retracts its arm and goes back to ignoring the lone figure, who is left standing alone. The comic, watermarked '©FURfLES', humorously captures the fatigue surrounding the long-running 'init wars' debate. It suggests that while the criticism of systemd is a well-known opinion, the vast majority of the community and major distributions have moved on, and the argument is now met with patronizing dismissal rather than engagement
Comments
23Comment deleted
We get it, you prefer a loosely-coupled collection of shell scripts for an init system. The rest of us have accepted our fate and are too busy trying to debug a failed service with `journalctl -xe` to argue
Complaining about systemd in 2025 is the new ‘tabs vs spaces’ - the thread is long, the outcome identical, and everyone’s build still boots with PID 1
Complaining about systemd while running it on every production server is like criticizing Kubernetes complexity while your entire infrastructure depends on it - we've all become experts at hating the things we can't live without
The systemd debate perfectly encapsulates the eternal struggle between Unix philosophy purists and pragmatic modernists - one side mourns the death of 'do one thing well' while the other enjoys sub-second boot times and declarative service management. The real irony? Both camps spend more time arguing about init systems than actually writing init scripts, and the thumbs-up gesture here represents the ultimate power move: responding to technical criticism with corporate-backed inevitability and a smile
Yelling 'systemd sucks' is a transient unit; the distros already set WantedBy=reality.target, and PID 1 just keeps reaping your argument with socket activation
Yell “systemd sucks” and every distro returns exit status 0 and keeps booting to default.target - the flamewar.service has been masked for years
Systemd scope creep to Gentoo USE flags: trading binary convenience for compile-time purgatory - pick your architectural masochism
Based Comment deleted
And shortly after OpenSuSE banned everyone. Comment deleted
What? Comment deleted
They recently declared everyone not left enough politically to be rotten flesh, banning users, members and contributors left and right. Comment deleted
Looks like an absolutely based opinion. Change my mind. Comment deleted
Well, Devuan's not the only one, there's Artix, Void, etc. Which are really good distros without systemd Comment deleted
I mean, it sucks but the alternatives suck more 🤷♂️ Comment deleted
Init.d forever! Comment deleted
Does systemd has any documentation really, btw? Because i find it absurdally hard to find something. Manpages are basic, and there's nothing advanced besides arch wiki Comment deleted
"Source code is the best documentation". © "Source code, mf, do you read it?" 🔫😡 Comment deleted
I'm paid per task, not per wasted time Comment deleted
sounds like a bad deal Comment deleted
In my experience systemd is very well documented both officially and by community. What is it you are unable to find? Comment deleted
True. Look at the amount of pages here: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/index.html Comment deleted
I had few issues but don't remember all. One of them was systemd-nspawn containers. I've received those containers from my predecessor. The only source that was decent was arch wiki Comment deleted
nspawn has a problem of being constructed so well you need mind-alteration drugs to understand it Comment deleted