Systemd: The Good Parts
I actually like using systemd. I took the time to learn how to use it, and as a desktop Linux user, it&#x27;s honestly quite nice.<p>But the one thing that still really pisses me off about systemd-the-project was the fact that they ate udev-the-project. In my view, that decision was unnecessary and was done for purely anti-competitive reasons.<p>If you&#x27;re not familiar, udev is basically the user-facing device manager for Linux. It&#x27;s what allows you to easily configure rules and permissions for all the USB devices that you plug into your computer. These devices still need kernel drivers, but udev is how you tell your system &quot;Please let user ohazi use this device, and also give it a convenient name like &#x2F;dev&#x2F;someDevice0&quot;<p>By devouring the udev project, the systemd maintainers have guaranteed that dealing with USB devices on non-systemd systems was going to be a giant pain.<p>Then came the forks -- Gentoo maintains eudev, which is a systemd-free fork of udev. But really, this shouldn&#x27;t be a fork. Udev should be independent and available on all systems. If systemd wants to do something special with devices, they should use udev APIs like everybody else. In my view, this is what finally allowed systemd to win the init war, despite all the protest. Ideological arguments about how best to start daemons is one thing, but you simply can&#x27;t use a modern system without a sane approach to USB.<p>Edit: It seems that some of my concerns were overblown, e.g. you apparently can run udev without systemd as pid 1. Udev has a build-time dependency on systemd, but not a run-time dependency. The eudev fork removes that build-time dependency, and (maybe?) also papers over some other inconsistencies. I&#x27;m pleased that this is the case. I&#x27;m annoyed that the discourse around systemd&#x2F;udev has been muddy enough to lead me to incorrect conclusions (and I&#x27;m aware that the original version of this comment likely added fuel to this particular fire). Oh well... live and learn.