Debian Developers Get User Input on Systemd

Systemd has been taking it on the chin lately because a lot of users just don't like it. There are varying reasons and Debian developer Michael Stapelberg has identified several through a recent user systemd survey. Developers hope the data will help them minimize the difficulty when the transition from SysVinit to Systemd begins.

On May 20 Stapelberg created and posted a survey to find out how users actually felt about systemd and, if they had issues, what were they? Through a short list of questions Stapelberg has discovered that 62% of 2113 respondents welcome systemd in Debian, everything seems to be working fine. 15% don't want it in Debian at all and the rest didn't know or care. In another question 44% said they'd like to see it as the default init system while 32% don't. 45% of the participants are Debian developers, maintainers, or contributors but only 74% had actually booted a machine running systemd.

Beyond that, Stapelberg asked those with issues what were their top concerns. About 50% had at least one to name. The biggest concern seems to be that "systemd is too complex, or bloated, or it does too many things, or has too many dependencies." "Debugging the boot process is harder that with SysVinit" is third and in sixth place is "I dislike binary logs and/or the journal in general." Number 8 is a lack of documentation and number 9 is what are the commands/how does it work? Others cited memory leaks and performance problems, but my main issue was way down number 14. "Customizing the boot is harder than with sysvinit." Someone needs to put out some darn good docs!

See Stapelberg's full post for lots more detail and catch his latest where he addresses the first big concern. In fact, bookmark the site because it looks like a series coming.