You can also read The problem with the anti systemd attitude.
This is not just hatred towards systemd, it can do things very well, the direction it is going isn’t great.
You can also read The problem with the anti systemd attitude.
This is not just hatred towards systemd, it can do things very well, the direction it is going isn’t great.
Okay, I agree 30MB isn’t a big deal, but that’s not really an argument not to optimize. The entire Debian Stable mirror for example has like 70,000 packages in it. Let’s say all of those packages took the position that “A few extra MB doesn’t matter.” If each one had just 1 extra MB that is 70GB of extra bloat. If each one had 2 extra MB that is 140GB of extra bloat. If each one had 30MB of extra bloat that is 2.1TB of extra bloat. Now obviously thats a very unrealistic, and extreme, example, but the point is that with a super complex operating system things add up. We should appreciate the nit picky little dudes who yell over 30MB because they’re probably responsible in part for a good bit of cumulative extra disk space for the rest of us.
The article is full of dishonest nonsense. It compares file sizes without comparing features. Well, actually it’s blatantly lying by saying that the setups have the “same functionality” when they clearly do not. For example, systemd-homed supports encrypted home directories which is potentially a useful feature for shared PCs, but the non-systemd setup uses nothing for managing /home, so it takes 0 bytes. NetworkManager has a size of “N/A” apparently. It looks like there should be notes or citations but they’re missing. They’re archived here if you’re interested, but it’s just a bunch of upstream URLs; this doesn’t show us what the author is comparing.
The other related point is also nonsense:
Well, no. We can evaluate how distros package systemd, not what systemd is or isn’t. The author uses Arch Linux to show that a systemd-based setup requires 36MB. But as the article itself states, arch linux puts every single binary into a single package. Not mentioned in the article is how Arch Linux also bundles other stuff most people don’t need in the packages, like header files, programming manual pages, completions for various shells, default configurations not part of systemd etc. Is the non-systemd setup done in the same way or is the author manually installing 6 executables and calling it “equivalent”? We can’t know because one the one side we have a real (worst-case) example of Arch Linux packaging systemd, and on the other side we have “to get the same functionality without systemd, a distribution could use”.
None of this illustrates any waste of space on the entire Debian Stable mirror if you’re worried about that. In fact the bundling of systemd component into a small number of packages saves space for Debian (though it potentially wastes space for your PC).
Ah okay. I was just taking issue with the idea that a few MB don’t matter. Thanks for expanding on your point. I’m very much pro-optimization got no real opinions on systemd tho.