Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

Just another “I don’t like systemd and refuse to understand it” rant.

I can’t think of any change that has improved my Linux sysadmin experience more than the move to systemd.

Is it complicated? Perhaps it is. But this FUD about it being resource intensive or unreliable or difficult to use is complete nonsense.

And on top of that systemd isn’t even “Linux.” Plenty of popular production-ready distros like Alpine Linux don’t even use it.

And of course I’m not saying FreeBSD is bad, but I’m not the one writing and publishing an article bashing a system I don’t understand.

systemd is indeed awesome. i'd rather kms than go back to maintaining init.d scripts.

> systemd is indeed awesome. i'd rather kms than go back to maintaining init.d scripts.

systemd-as-init-replacement was probably fine. systemd-as-kitchen-sink can get annoying.

But where does the init system end and the kitchen-sink begin? For instance do you consider networking to be part of init or is it something else. For me, I bring network up in initramfs, so it's definitely part of my init.

The only truly bad systemd-* I've worked with is systemd-journald. Which often fails to contain log entries that should be present or simply just corrupts itself.

> But where does the init system end and the kitchen-sink begin?

resolved, timesyncd, homed, journald, networkd (was very happy with Debian's interfaces(5)). Never thought of mounting file systems as process control, so also add mounting and taking over fstab. Given the ever-growing number of 'sub-systems', I'm sure new ones have been created that I'm not aware of. (I'm personally most regularly annoyed by resolved, especially as a server sysadmin where I need DNS to be deterministic, and not clever: I've gotten to the point of doing a chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf.)

I'm waiting for a systemd-mail so Zawinski's Law can be fulfilled:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law

> For me, I bring network up in initramfs, so it's definitely part of my init.

I've run Solaris, IRIX, BSD, and 1990s Linux, and I've never thought of networking as related to process control (init).