journald. cron. systemd core does these, whether or not you succeed in hacking around them and run one of the standard daemons independently.
The systemd ecosystem is increasingly fragile unless you use all of the parts. resolved is becoming increasingly necessary for DNS lookup stability on systemd distros on things like laptops. homed is being pushed pretty hard; arch boot logs complain about not having homed if it isn’t being used, although it still works.
Leonard has argued that, just because systemd isn’t one giant binary, it isn’t monolithic. However, the parts of the systemd ecosystem that take over logging, cron, daemon control, logind, and so on are tightly coupled. The elogind effort spends most of its effort decoupling elogind from systemd (c.f. seatd). I’ve read (but haven’t tried) that you can’t replace logind with something else on systemd installs. You can run it alongside, but removing systemd-logind breaks login. I suspect thats less systemd and more a distribution thing, but the tendancy to tightly couple these packages is concerning. It’s something which doesn’t tend to happen in Arch for other systems… there are usually alternatives providing a capability to choose from, but the systemd components are so tightly coupled that, if you want to use, say, syslog-ng, you basically have to switch distributions.
Which other “parts” of systemd are needed if you only needed the systemd init “part”?
journald. cron. systemd core does these, whether or not you succeed in hacking around them and run one of the standard daemons independently.
The systemd ecosystem is increasingly fragile unless you use all of the parts. resolved is becoming increasingly necessary for DNS lookup stability on systemd distros on things like laptops. homed is being pushed pretty hard; arch boot logs complain about not having homed if it isn’t being used, although it still works.
Leonard has argued that, just because systemd isn’t one giant binary, it isn’t monolithic. However, the parts of the systemd ecosystem that take over logging, cron, daemon control, logind, and so on are tightly coupled. The elogind effort spends most of its effort decoupling elogind from systemd (c.f. seatd). I’ve read (but haven’t tried) that you can’t replace logind with something else on systemd installs. You can run it alongside, but removing systemd-logind breaks login. I suspect thats less systemd and more a distribution thing, but the tendancy to tightly couple these packages is concerning. It’s something which doesn’t tend to happen in Arch for other systems… there are usually alternatives providing a capability to choose from, but the systemd components are so tightly coupled that, if you want to use, say, syslog-ng, you basically have to switch distributions.