Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

diziet.dreamwidth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 89 posts

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#21

Post by cempaka »

enriquto wrote: post #8
TekMol wrote: post #4

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

> I would love if a major distro emerges Good news for you! You have slackware [0], void [1] and alpine [3], which are widely-used non-systemd distributions with sane scripts. They are well-maintained rolling releases which allow you to use much newer versions of the kernel and packages than your typical ubuntu/debian installs. I don't particularly care about systemd, but these distros are great by themselves! [0] ht…

I've just started playing with Void because I want to use runit on both my dev machines (Linux) and servers (FreeBSD). I've really been liking it a lot, although the batteries-not-included approach did not phase me since I've been on Arch for awhile. Another thing that prompted the switch was annoying intermittent failures of systemd-resolved.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#22

Post by pantalaimon »

evronm wrote: post #7
TekMol wrote: post #4

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

Amen! I would happily contribute both time and funds to such an effort.

https://www.devuan.org/

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#23

Post by doublerabbit »

blakesterz wrote: post #15

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

My gripe is on system shutdown.

It always encounters some service to hang to where systemd responds:

"Waiting for service to halt - xx / 2m"

I've never not encountered that experience.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#24

Post by enthus1ast »

oarmstrong wrote: post #9
TekMol wrote: post #4

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

Obviously it’s a different OS and possibly isn’t relevant to you but I’ve found solace in OpenBSD (and other BSDs) in the search of “simplicity” of “the old days”.

I tried FreeBSD a few times, but after ~4 hours of reading docs, searching the forums etc, I was not able to create a fully featured systemd like service. With stop, start, restart and auto restart support. something was always missing or not working correctly.

But what I found was lots of hate and stupid talkin against systemd, that they all hate it and that FreeBSD will "never have this $hit"

I thought to myself, yeah just hate systemd but not able to produce an easy to use and full fledged service manager. The arrogance was staggering, and I stopped my use of freebsd since then, in almost all aspects linux is superior anyhow.

Such a fully featured systemd service is easily done in 6 - 8 lines of configuration.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#25

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

TekMol wrote: post #4

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

> stays away from any "binary" formats

isn't a text file also binary at the end of the day?

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#26

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

doublerabbit wrote: post #23
blakesterz wrote: post #15

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

My gripe is on system shutdown. It always encounters some service to hang to where systemd responds: "Waiting for service to halt - xx / 2m" I've never not encountered that experience.

That's the default distro configuration more than a systemd issue. It can be changed and 20 minutes for a desktop config is far too high.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#27

Post by DaSHacka »

TekMol wrote: post #4

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

>major distro emerges have you tried gentoo? Really fits your requirement of 'emerges' lol

They also have a pretty good page on their wiki that explains the current popular alternative init systems to systemd(0), even ones gentoo doesn't support.

[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#28

Post by zamalek »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #26
doublerabbit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gripe is on system shutdown. It always encounters some service to hang to where systemd responds: "Waiting for service to halt - xx / 2m" I've never not encountered that experience.

That's the default distro configuration more than a systemd issue. It can be changed and 20 minutes for a desktop config is far too high.

I have googled this in the past with no success, how do you change the timeout?

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#29

Post by lambda »

blakesterz wrote: post #15

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

I have had one issue related to systemd; at one point when doing a routine update there was some dangling symlink issue that caused systemd to crash. This wasn't catastrophic; a lot of things didn't work, but I was able to cleanly save and exit out of applications, manually run a sync to make sure everything was flushed to disk, and then hard reboot.

This was the issue, I think: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742322

systemd hasn't been without issue, but I've definitely had fewer issues with systemd than I did dealing with broken init scripts or upstart prior to moving to systemd.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#30

Post by agwa »

blakesterz wrote: post #15

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

I've never had data loss (assuming that's what "lossage" means), but here's an incomplete list of problems I've experienced on systems running systemd:

* System randomly taking 5+ minutes to boot

* Daemons sometimes not starting on boot

* Logging sometimes just stops (I confirmed this was caused by a systemd bug)

* Logging in over SSH starts taking 2 minutes and can only be fixed by reboot (I confirmed this was caused by a systemd bug)

It's not that sysvinit scripts are without bugs, especially race conditions and daemons inheriting environment when you invoke a restart script, but systemd appears to be distinct in that a seemingly-quiescent system can just suddenly stop working correctly. They had a low bar to clear to improve on the reliability of sysvinit systems, and yet they failed to clear it. That's not surprising given its excessively complex design.

Post reply on HN