Systemd in Mageia

[zugunder]

Hi guys,
I recently discovered that Mageia moved to systemd and, having heard some buzz about it here and there, did a brief investigation on what it actually is. And I must confess, I do not understand the reasons why distros like Mageia should adopt it. Not am I too smart, but I hope I am not stupid... So since long ago I hear that systemd is to optimize and streamline system boot-up and to do it in a “correct” way. Not sure what they mean by the latter, but the former statement does not seem to be true – at least from what I heard about boot times in SUSE with systemd.
What actually kicked me to write this message is this thread:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/169082
Briefly, how I understood it – they incorporated a http-server and a QR-code generator in systemd for the purpose of making an additional protective security layer. And you can't decline that, so every time your system starts, it will load those two. OK, it might be of certain importance for an enterprise solution like RHEL, but what for is this in a “home-user” distro? You are getting longer boot time, additional processes and CPU load and, looking at this guy's activity (Lennart I mean), I am not sure that he doesn't have any more plans for extending systemd by incorporating more and more services into it.
Well, Red Hat probably knows what it is doing, but still – it is a business, they need it for their corporate product. What not clear to me is why many “independent” distros blindly follow their initiatives. The first warning for me was their decision to kick out several power management settings from KDE (discussed on KDE.org). Then they made running akonadi necessary for using many KDE applications. Now it is systemd. I could dump KDE on my machine (though I got used to it), but systemd is to stay with me forever, unless I switch to Gentoo or Ubuntu or go crazy and decide to make my own distro...
Maybe I do not understand something, but the fact that I must load http-server and QR-code generator (and maybe something else in future, depending on what that guy decides) every time I start my laptop makes me think that something is really wrong – either with me or with the world, sorry...

[doktor5000]

Maybe you misunderstood or need to read up a bit more. systemd package on Fedora requires a small http server and a QR code generator, it does not necessarily start those.
The http server is when you want to view your syslog as a website, or maybe even from remote over the internet.

That does not mean that those are enabled by default or are starting by default. Also systemd sped up the boot process quite a lot,
and it even eases many things or saves ressources, f.ex. due to socket-based service activation. You may want to read up on
the links at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/inetd.html starting by the rightmost one: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/system ... ins-1.html

Also AFAIK Akonadi and power management changes for KDE was pushed by KDE developers and Akonadi made mandatory for most KDEPIM applications, and also for many others. Nothing to do with Fedora, as Fedora is a more GNOME-centric distro ...

[zugunder]

OK, I admit, I am not an expert in all that, but can't one read a syslog over internet without systemd? Has it added this functionality? In case I do not need this feature, as I am not a server administrator, can I do without it somehow? The answer is "no" as far as I can see...
In addition to that, you (as a distro builder) and me (as a distro user) must also adopt /etc/os-release thingie which goes now bundled with systemd (http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/os-release.html). One more invention from the same studio, having dubious use. And I guess, not the last one.
As for the links you provided, there are no tests with numbers there, so I do not have any reasons to believe that systemd is actually any faster than its predecessors... The person whom I trust (since he is a well-known in our local Russian Linux world ) tested booting SUSE with systemd (55 sec) and with SysV (46 sec) and compared the numbers to Fedora 14 (pre-systemd), which was almost 3x faster than SUSE (here is the link: http://alv.me/?p=1484, I can translate if necessary).
As for the power management, take a look here:
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=88774&p=167795&hilit=fedora+kde+power#p167795:

This was primarily the result of work by Holger Macht and was additionally encouraged by Fedora also.
The thread was called "[PATCH] powerdevil-remove-cpufreq.patch" on the kde-devel mailing list.

I am not surprised that big vendors like Red Hat are trying to put the development of other distros under control, but I am quite surprised that the things they thrust on distros are accepted without questions...