[mdlug] Big brother gives M$ a 10 out of 10

[Ron / BCLUG]

Jonathan Billings wrote on 2024-05-25 06:25:

> I think the best argument I hear today is that systemd has scope creep.
>   They’ll concede that systemd is a good startup/init system, but it’s
> doing other things now.  However, I’ll argue that many of those things
> are to take advantage of a kernel feature (such as login management and
> resource management) or bootloader (which is to resolve a lot of issues
> with GRUB2), for example.

I'll agree that scope creep gives me pause sometimes.

Most often, when I look into it further, a reasonable case is made in 
favour of it.

Usually I'm not knowledgeable enough to properly evaluate the pros & 
cons so leave it to the distro maintainers to decide.



> I also have a complaint about how systemd launches process as part of
> the login. Systemd launches a systemd --user process, which runs as the
> user, but it doesn’t descend from the user’s login process but instead
> the pid 1 systemd process, so it doesn’t inherit certain things from the
>   login process that have traditionally been used by PAM modules, such as
>   session keyrings. The systemd devs think it’s fine to just use user
> keyrings, but historically, services like Kerberos used session
> keyrings, so you could have multiple logins with different credential
> caches in a session keyring, and now systemd says that’s not possible.
> Kinda frustrating, but there are workarounds.

Now that's an interesting point that I hadn't come across before.

I will watch for further discussions on it to see what I can learn about 
it before forming any opinions.


It does reinforce my feeling that agree or not, the systemd folks have a 
deep understanding of Linux that I can only dream of achieving.



Cheers,

rb