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Ubuntu without systemd

Started by gameblabla, November 03, 2016, 06:29:56 AM

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gameblabla

As of you may know, Debian already switched to systemd a long time ago.
Since Ubuntu is based on it, they had no say on the matter and they were forced to accept the changes.
Most people think it is impossible to run Ubuntu without systemd.

There's actually a way to remove most of the systemd on Ubuntu. (except for libsystemd0)
Here's how to do it (basically) :
Install Upstart-sysv
sudo apt-get install upstart-sysv
Lightdm will not work without systemd, despite it claiming to not depend on it.
SDDM also requires systemd so we can't use it.
You can install another one like lxdm, wdm or xdm. I recommend lxdm.
sudo apt-get install lxdm
After it is installed, reboot, choose Advanced in the grub and pick the Upstart one. (or the default one if this doesn't work)
Now you can definitively purge systemd for good :
sudo apt-get remove systemd --purge

BOOM, it's gone now.

And that my friend, is how i got my ubuntu 16.04 Pc fully working with a custom lxqt installation, working sound through alsa
and without the diseases known as pulseaudio, dbus and systemd.
  • Calculators owned: None (used to own an Nspire and TI-89)

Hayleia

Could simpletons like me have some information about what systemd is, why Debian and Ubuntu switched to it and why some people wouldn't want it?
Just links if you don't feel like explaining.
For now I found that (french) but I'm not sure if that covers everything that is needed to understand the "problem".

novenary

Or you know, don't use the even bigger disease that ubuntu and every other distro in the debian family are in the first place. :P

gameblabla

#3
Quote from: Hayleia on November 03, 2016, 09:16:06 AM
Could simpletons like me have some information about what systemd is, why Debian and Ubuntu switched to it and why some people wouldn't want it?
Just links if you don't feel like explaining.
For now I found that (french) but I'm not sure if that covers everything that is needed to understand the "problem".
This might clear some things up a bit :
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Your article only talks about systemd-sysv but it also fail to mention it is also a dhcp client, a logger, dns discovery,  uefi loader,
a firewall and more... all of this in PID 1.

How Debian adopted systemd is controversal in itself. They basically held a secret voting where they only showed as alternatives the old
sysvinit.
They decided to adopt systemd while failling to consider alternatives such as runit and very few decided on the matter.
In fact, this alone led to Devuan.

As for Ubuntu, well at first they were against using systemd but as it is based on Debian, rather than forking,
they decided to accept Debian's decision to switch to systemd.

Some of the bugs that seriously make a cry are :
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=761658
If you think Debian cares about your privacy, you must read this.
This was a "feature" introduced by systemd when they would fall back to google nameservers.
This is a huge privacy issue but how the maintener answered the concerned ?
By calling critics google haters and linking to google's privacy terms, saying it is a company that cares about privacy.
(LOL)
In the end, nothing has changed and it is still falling back to Google nameservers when using systemd to this day.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437
Another Google related issue.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
You can hard-brick some non-compliant UEFI computers by simply doing rm -rf /.

Another bug i discovered when i used to be on Ubuntu 14.04.
Having this in /etc/network/interfaces :
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

And systemd will attempt to connect it and assuming it's going to have internet.
What's even worse is the fact it will wait 30 more seconds before it proceeds,
and this delay is completely arbitrary.

Another similar issue i found but this time on Ubuntu 16.04 using encryption.
Select the "encrypted" home folder upon installation and you'll have horrible boot times
because systemd adds an arbitrary delay of 1 minute and 30 seconds.
During this long delay, it does absolute nothingness.
Switching to Upstart fixes this issue and results in much better boot times.

I also want to mention that systemd is a major CPU and memory hog. (not as much as X11 but pretty close)

That, @Hayleia, is in a nutshell is why systemd is so bad, even if streetwalrus might tell you the contrary.

QuoteOr you know, don't use the even bigger disease that ubuntu and every other distro in the debian family are in the first place. :P
I know but currently, all the other distributions has some issues or they don't carry the packages i need.
I had tried Void Linux in the past and but the xbps thing and the fact there is nothing like a padoka's ppa or even something like Debian testing
miss me.
I also never was able to complete a Gentoo installation mainly due to my slow connection.
  • Calculators owned: None (used to own an Nspire and TI-89)

novenary

The UEFI issues are completely unrelated to systemd, it's due to broken firmwares allowing to delete critical nvram variables without any kind of failsafe mechanism. efivarsfs is part of the kernel, not systemd.
The loader doesn't even run in pid1, it's simply gummiboot that they forked.

The dns thing is very much arguable, the whole dns system is completely unencrypted and anyone can intercept your requests trivially. Before distrusting Google's dns, distrust your isp.

With that out of the way, I completely agree with the fact that systemd is full of bloat and thus bugs*, it does a great job at improving process management compared to sysv init scripts, but while logging is probably fine to keep in there, the rest is not. Network configuration and other bullc belong in separate (and already existing) daemons. Uselessd was an OK idea but far from perfect. In the meantime, I haven't found any better though, and the bloaty features are optional (I use networkmanager on my desktop and arch's pretty good netctl on my raspberry pi), so I'm sticking with it.

* The most annoying has to be "waiting for session cN of user xxx" on shutdown, with an insane timeout.

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