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Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

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Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#71
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some random observations: * System randomly taking 5+ minutes to boot "systemd-analyze blame" can help identify issues relating to boot time * Daemons sometimes not starting on boot This most often occurs for me when services don't start quickly enough (too much contention on spinning rust and aggressive default timeout settings) so I have to adjust startup timeouts. "systemctl --state=failed" along with "systemctl s…

> I've sometimes had this happen and for me it seems to be related to systemd-resolved deciding to stop responding to queries and the only solution I've found so far that actually works is to restart the system. I hit this all the time on my Arch laptop and was a major impetus to switch to Void.

Void is like Arch before Arch started pissing me off.

I use Void, btw.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#72
post #30

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…

“Lossage” can also mean loss of service or other breakage. Any failure that wastes your time debugging and fixing the problem.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#73
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are a number of things that I just can't accomplish with systemd that I can accomplish without it. can you name those? I am eager to try them in system with minimum resources.

Sure. My most recent headache is with using a USB wifi dongle. During system startup, I want to attach some remote drives over wifi, so I need to be able to do that after the wifi connection is established. Systemd does not appear to be able to tell when that happens. It thinks the network is established before it actually is, and then the mount calls cause the startup process to pause for 3 minutes for those mount c…

The funny thing is that sounds like a perfect case for systemd: By eating so many parts of the OS (here, device management, filesystem mounting, networking, and service management), it should be able to create very explicit dependency graphs - "this mount depends on this network which depends on this device". I wonder where the problem is - can it not properly handle something between the device and network? Or is it hitting the "network is up" goal too early?

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#74
post #61

The hate towards systemd stems from a fact that it tries to do so many things -- which is clearly against Unix philosophy. Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited.

> Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited. You're willfully conflating the systemd project repository with the init system. I use systemd the init system, but in-tree components like resolved and networkd have never run on any of my machines. Surely you can understand that a monorepo with code reuse across myriad compone…

> One can argue the systemd project is simply following in the Linux kernel's footsteps here. It too is a monorepo chock full of all kernel functionality one might ever need, with the expectation that use cases will pick and choose what snowflake suits them best.

Linux is openly a monolithic kernel that builds everything in one tree. Are you sure that's the analogy you want to pick?

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#75
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are your feeling about the philosophy behind it, i.e. GPL vs BSD license?

I'm actually neutral on that. Both licenses are fine for my purposes, and I have no real philosophical issues with either of them.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#76

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)

Very uncommon. I'm using it since it became default on Arch and never had any problems. Systemd is actually the best thing to happen to Linux. Luddites gonna luddit.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#77
post #62

The hate towards systemd stems from a fact that it tries to do so many things -- which is clearly against Unix philosophy. Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited.

Systemd is umbrella project for many software components, one of which is pid1 init. Almost all of the components are optional and many of them integrate through well-defined interfaces.

> Systemd is umbrella project for many software components, one of which is pid1 init.

And most of the other components only work with the init system; systemd is modular, but it's one system.

> Almost all of the components are optional and many of them integrate through well-defined interfaces.

Well-defined interfaces that the project specified themselves and that rarely have any other implementations.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#78
post #71
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've sometimes had this happen and for me it seems to be related to systemd-resolved deciding to stop responding to queries and the only solution I've found so far that actually works is to restart the system. I hit this all the time on my Arch laptop and was a major impetus to switch to Void.

Void is like Arch before Arch started pissing me off. I use Void, btw.

Heh I absolutely love Arch, and probably would never have made it to the point of being able to do Void or FreeBSD installs if it wasn't for Arch and its excellent docs. But yeah, some kinda annoying stuff with it lately.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#79
post #78
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Void is like Arch before Arch started pissing me off. I use Void, btw.

Heh I absolutely love Arch, and probably would never have made it to the point of being able to do Void or FreeBSD installs if it wasn't for Arch and its excellent docs. But yeah, some kinda annoying stuff with it lately.

Thanks for upvoting if you did, my karma is now 16,384!

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#80
post #16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Note that only Slackware testing is rolling-release. Normal Slackware is about as far from rolling release as you can get. I do highly recommend it though! Slackware's init scripts were always a pleasure to use, part of why I was anti-systemd for a long time.

Of those, I think only Void is fully rolling release; Slackware, as you note, is very much not rolling, and Alpine has regular releases and you'd have to go to the "edge" version to get rolling releases.
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