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theandrewbaileytoday at 10:35 AM5 repliesview on HN

It violates the Unix philosophy of 'do only one thing and do it well', but personally, it has never been a problem for me.

I had a nightmare last week wherein I read a headline that systemd was writing its own kernel. When I woke up I realized it was a possibility, after all it has replaced GRUB. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-boot


Replies

zamadatixtoday at 10:44 AM

There is a lot systemd violates in regards to the traditional Unix philosphy rules. The one about do one thing well is probably the most arguable though since systemd is more a set of functionality across a ton of binaries, each with a more focused purpose. Where it differs is in how those interact vs a "normal" collection of Linux binaries where it's expected to be easy to swap out an individual component and still talk to the rest without implementing things like binary formats.

gf000today at 11:14 AM

Linux kernel, X server, web browsers all seriously violate the Unix philosophy.

And to be perfectly honest, it's nothing more than a philosophy - it's not some universal truth, e.g. a browser by definition is not doing "one small thing" and complex workloads are better organized by monolithic software to a certain degree.

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happymellontoday at 10:44 AM

> It violates the Unix philosophy of 'do only one thing and do it well'

How? This is really where it's basically a marketing fail.

Even your own link for system-boot shows that it is it's own rebranding of gummi-boot. It's not part of the init system, they just have an identically named project which has 100 utilities in it. It's dumb and it's community hostile.

Jnrtoday at 11:04 AM

> after all it has replaced GRUB.

With unified kernel images there is no need for grub or any other bootloader anymore. And UKI simplifies boot configuration and helps improving security in some aspects.

7bittoday at 11:19 AM

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