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Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

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Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#41

Post by JohnFen »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #5
tetris11 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started on initrc but came to maturity on systemd, and though systemd does simplify the process of inspecting running tasks, its sheer lack-of-fun of getting those processes running in the first place always puts me off hacking my system to better suit my whims. It forces you to think of stability instead of creativity, and that might be great for people who value predictable things in their lives, but it stands ri…

It’s an init system and a process manager. How exactly can it be fun? Technically, I guess it’s interesting to design if you are an expert but as a user, having to use creativity is the last thing I want from low level pieces of my OS. If you want to tinker with OS design, you can always install Minix in a VM.

> It’s an init system and a process manager. How exactly can it be fun?

I don't know about fun, but different people find different things fun.

I find systemd to be often irritating, and sometimes infuriating. It has not made my life easier at all. Just the opposite. So, in that sense anyway, I'd say systemd is much less fun.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#42

Post by jorvi »

agwa wrote: post #30
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 cause…

It has been ultra-reliable for me on 3 systems, over the course of a couple of years.

I can't say that about any of the other init systems you just mentioned.

> They had a low bar to clear to improve on the reliability of sysvinit systems, and yet they failed to clear it

systemd hasn't just cleared it, it has leapfrogged it.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#43

Post by dizhn »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #13
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.

It will always be a fringe effort since the vast majority of the people doing the actual work are fine with it. It's been what, ten years by now? If instead of complaining all that time systemd haters cooperated and put in the work, they could have produced something (supposedly) much better by now. Alpine is probably your best bet, it's pretty widely used. All of the others are a minority of a minority of a minority…

Unfortunately alpine ships with a lot of init scripts that don't work. To make it worse it ships with init scripts that could never have worked. I don't know if discovering this should make me stay away from it as a distro or send patches (which is not trivial. I tried a few times). I do like < 3 minutes full distro version upgrades though.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#44

Post by freedomben »

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.

Agreed, I'd say it's first on the system that isn't handling exiting/shutdown cleanly, and secondly on the distro config timeout value. I get this quite a bit on some machines (I use Fedora) and it is super annoying. I have yet to find which service is resonsible though as anytime I'm shutting the system down is inherently not a good time for debugging :-)

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#45

Post by JohnFen »

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”.

This is the direction I'm going. I've already begun the process of converting all of my machines away from Linux to BSD.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#47

Post by VancouverMan »

ttfkam wrote: post #2

It's been fashionable to hate on systemd, but I definitely prefer it to the hodgepodge of inconsistent init scripts, logging hacks, and bespoke process monitors that preceded it. init.d was familiar to graybeards (like myself), but I'm loathe to consider them a superior solution.

> It's been fashionable to hate on systemd, ...

From what I can see, the dislike exists for far more practical reasons.

In my experience, it has a tendency to break in ways that the numerous other init systems I've used over the decades never did.

When it does break, it can easily prevent a computer from booting, which makes that computer pretty much useless until the problem is fixed.

I've found that it has often been far more difficult, and takes far more effort, to debug and fix problems with it than with other init systems.

Its tendency to become more invasive over time has also opened the door for even more problems involving it, well beyond its role as an init system.

Given the large number of bug reports, questions, complaints, and so on about it that I've seen over the years, people don't dislike it just to be "fashionable". They dislike it because it's making their lives unnecessarily painful.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#48

Post by freedomben »

johnklos wrote: post #36
jjoonathan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. My toes hurt every time Lennart Poettering steps on them, but every time I dig into the "why" it turns out to not only have been a good reason but a couldn't have worked any other way reason. If someone hadn't dragged Linux kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the arbitrary choices made in the definition of a config file format 50 years ago would cripple the ability to deliver basic features 50 years la…

> good reason I've been looking for these for years: the reasons that might justify the removal of basic functionality and interoperability with other tools. Got any sources?

Lennart's "Rethinking PID 1" was highly enlightening for me[1]. The LWN discussion on it was also really good[2].

[1]: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

[2]: https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#49

Post by tapoxi »

sgerenser wrote: post #17
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 heard of one either. While systemd is certainly more complex than old school init scripts, and arguably deviates quite a bit from the “Unix philosophy,” it seems some people just have an irrational hatred towards it. To the point of making up problems with it that I’ve never heard anyone actually having.

It's been a blessing for me. It's so easy to see the process hierarchy, easy to create units and timers and dependencies, and with services being combined into cgroups the concept of a zombie process was basically eliminated.

I guess I get that init was simple, but it didn't care about the process lifecycle. You always needed to have an incredibly smart init script or watchdog service to manage that.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#50

Post by theonemind »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #25
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?

Text files are generally more resistant to corruption, especially when parsed by a human, and more repairable if they do get corruption. (A one byte error probably won't matter in a text file; it could wreck parsing rigid structure.)

They more easily work with a lot of un-specialized tools, or tools specialized for text, which is a very general problem with very transferable learning.

Perhaps better to distinguish between "structured" and "unstructured" or "machine optimized" vs "human optimized".

A different beast at the end of the day, whatever name or distinction you use.

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