good read
Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
41–50 of 332 posts
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#42This was an amazing review, and love systemd or hate it, this article gives a fantastic history and exposition of what systemd actually is . My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think): systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit.…
I’m a fan of this description. It might not be the easiest to understand or the first one you should read, but I wish more things had this kind of description somewhere (but not necessarily on the introductory materials or front page).
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's kind of like locked bootloaders and pentalobe screwdrivers for organizing a unix system where most users were used to easy to inspect and modify scripts and single purpose programs . yes, it's still open source, but modifications and inspection are far more complicated creating a much higher barrier to entry. in the earlier days when it was still buggy, even linus himself was screaming about not being able to ea…
Right. I have a simple rule: don’t use a GNU/Linux system that uses systemd. It doesn’t respect the Unix philosophy. It’s trying to turn it into Windows. I’m waiting for Microsoft to buy Red Hat. Failing that, IBM.
I mean, emacs doesn't respect the UNIX philosophy either, but that's one of the most praised pieces of software to come out of the UNIX space.
The UNIX philosophy isn't meant to be taken as gospel - hell, it's very hard to define what "doing one thing" even means.
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#44This was an amazing review, and love systemd or hate it, this article gives a fantastic history and exposition of what systemd actually is . My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think): systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit.…
...so, how does a systemd unit definition differ from a Makefile (other than using a different syntax, obviously)? What features would you need to add to UNIX make (and PID 1, for that matter) in order to be able to separate out this whole dependency management business from the other stuff PID 1 has to deal with already?
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#45Systemd pissed off many people. For me and most users, the transition was fully imperceptible. With the difference that systemctl tools seem to work better for what it does than the many sparse different tools it replaced.
it's kind of like locked bootloaders and pentalobe screwdrivers for organizing a unix system where most users were used to easy to inspect and modify scripts and single purpose programs . yes, it's still open source, but modifications and inspection are far more complicated creating a much higher barrier to entry. in the earlier days when it was still buggy, even linus himself was screaming about not being able to ea…
It's not like systemd is written in deliberately obfuscated C or something inscrutable altogether like Brainfuck.
A monorepo containing well-organized boring C, developed on github of all places, is the polar opposite of raising the barrier to contributing vs. what was replaced.
Full-disclosure: I contribute to systemd.
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#46The hatred for Systemd seems to come from those who see the unix philosophy of small, single use programs being thrown away in favour of a monolith.
Back when I had linux as a desktop (around the day of slackware 10) there were plenty of problems with simple stuff like mounting usbs, connecting to wifi etc--possible but a pain. I've hardly looked at systemd or linux in such a way for a long time, however.
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I lost 2 or 3 hours yesterday due to not realising systemd was changing things I changed for a reason. This is one of my go-to reasons when people ask me why systemd is bad. Once it overrode power settings I had configured in xfce-power-manager. Mainly I wanted the lid close to do nothing on AC power and to sleep on battery. It started sleeping for everything after an update once. I think in the end I couldn't figur…
When waiting for units to shut down, have you tried pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete 7 times? It forces a reboot, and you can turn the machine off before linux has taken over again.
> have you tried pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete 7 times? It forces a reboot
Not sure if serious? At that point, how is that any better than just using Windows? "Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete 7 times" has long been SOP there.
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#48This was an amazing review, and love systemd or hate it, this article gives a fantastic history and exposition of what systemd actually is . My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think): systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit.…
It reads like an over-eager developer read Design Patterns and then was tasked with writing a new init system for Linux.
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#49Systemd pissed off many people. For me and most users, the transition was fully imperceptible. With the difference that systemctl tools seem to work better for what it does than the many sparse different tools it replaced.
I’m young enough to have missed the transition and really like systemd, I rely on it for as much as I can
Like what if you don't mind me asking, and what did people used to use as an alternative?
Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's kind of like locked bootloaders and pentalobe screwdrivers for organizing a unix system where most users were used to easy to inspect and modify scripts and single purpose programs . yes, it's still open source, but modifications and inspection are far more complicated creating a much higher barrier to entry. in the earlier days when it was still buggy, even linus himself was screaming about not being able to ea…
It's not like systemd is written in deliberately obfuscated C or something inscrutable altogether like Brainfuck. A monorepo containing well-organized boring C, developed on github of all places, is the polar opposite of raising the barrier to contributing vs. what was replaced. Full-disclosure: I contribute to systemd.
There is a difference between the best C, and scripts that you can modify in-place.
But, like some other comments have said, I was young enough to dodge the drama. I basically grew up with systemd and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. The biggest problem I have is that Ubuntu Server defaults (or used to default) to having the system wait on network interfaces, which is annoying when I want to build a desktop off of it. And sometimes on shutdown it waits for some daemon I don't care about to quit. Which is probably just a bug in the daemon.