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Systemd 252

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Re: Systemd 252

#111
post #2

Systemd is without doubt one of the most important items of software on a modern Linux today, except perhaps for the Linux kernel itself. It turned the mess of shell scripts and other crap into the rock-solid, foundational system services layer we enjoy nowadays. If we do ever get the year of the Linux Desktop, we will have to thank the authors of systemd for giving us a bedrock of delight to build upon.

I'm not a Linux expert, but I thought that systemd was generally hated?

Less hated ad time goes on. I still think it's architecturally stupid (look at openrc for something that accomplishes similar goals but better), but it's been a while since it's broken anything terribly for me, or introduced any terrible security vulnerability. It's not great, but it's not actively hurting.

Re: Systemd 252

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Linux expert, but I thought that systemd was generally hated?

I've developed a distrust for anyone who hates on systemd in 2022, especially if their rationale is vague dogma like "it does more than 1 thing, it's not Unix-like!" It's usually a signal that the person is not a practioner. Systemd is the most important and well-developed Linux framework, besides the Linux kernel itself.

I mean have you actually used the alternatives? I find most of the people with that opinion are young pups who jumped on the linux train after most of the systemd bugs have been ironed out, but who still have zero experience with the alternatives.

Re: Systemd 252

#114
post #2

Systemd is without doubt one of the most important items of software on a modern Linux today, except perhaps for the Linux kernel itself. It turned the mess of shell scripts and other crap into the rock-solid, foundational system services layer we enjoy nowadays. If we do ever get the year of the Linux Desktop, we will have to thank the authors of systemd for giving us a bedrock of delight to build upon.

I wish Windows ran systemd--seriously. Windows services and low level functionality is just a hot mess of cruft, decade plus old UI and configs, etc. Please jettison it all and give a consistent declarative way to manage it all like systemd does for Linux.

You can run virtually any Windows application on top of Systemd already via Wine.

Unless you have some particular attachment to the NT kernel, there near zero reasons to use Windows today.

Re: Systemd 252

#115
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>thought that systemd was generally hated? If it was generally hated there would be a lot more support for the distros that don't have systemd. There isn't. Except for alpine, all of them are extremely niche, half of them are dead, the other half barely have enough people to stick around for a release a year. Even alpine is kinda niche, it's mostly used as a way to make lightweight docker containers, rather than as a…

>Except for alpine, all of them are extremely niche, half of them are dead, the other half barely have enough people to stick around for a release a year. FreeBSD & OpenBSD would happily disagree.

Those aren't linux distros

Re: Systemd 252

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once won a backdoor contest by installing a systemd socket who launched /bin/sh as root. At this point, people don't question why systemd is being bound to some random ports.

were you able to install this without using sudo?

In the contest you had root access for a limited amount of time, but you can also do it via a user unit.

Re: Systemd 252

#117

It feels like the time is ripe for something simpler and more modern to replace* systemd. The timing of this release coincides with me being bitten with yet another bug** on the weekend. How long until “Systemd: The Good Parts”? *The most trivial new name would be système which would at least be in keeping with the French naming. **In Debian stable if you create a new user, ssh in as that user, logout, then delete th…

It happened for PulseAudio, perhaps something compatible but leaner can emerge for systemd.

Re: Systemd 252

#118
post #2

Systemd is without doubt one of the most important items of software on a modern Linux today, except perhaps for the Linux kernel itself. It turned the mess of shell scripts and other crap into the rock-solid, foundational system services layer we enjoy nowadays. If we do ever get the year of the Linux Desktop, we will have to thank the authors of systemd for giving us a bedrock of delight to build upon.

I'd argue the success of the Steam Deck is evidence of the Linux desktop's maturity. The normal game UI is just another Wayland session, and it's a fully functional PC running Arch Linux. KDE is installed and easily accessible.

Re: Systemd 252

#119
post #9
post #2

Systemd is without doubt one of the most important items of software on a modern Linux today, except perhaps for the Linux kernel itself. It turned the mess of shell scripts and other crap into the rock-solid, foundational system services layer we enjoy nowadays. If we do ever get the year of the Linux Desktop, we will have to thank the authors of systemd for giving us a bedrock of delight to build upon.

Alpine linux seems to be doing fine without systemd.

alpine linux is a minimalist distro intended for running a single process within a container. I guarantee the base OS the container is running on us running systemD.

Re: Systemd 252

#120
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are solid technical reasons for systemd's binary logging. The nice thing about its binary log format is that it's organised by fields which are indexed for quicker searching and filtering. It's much easier and faster to analyse these logs than the traditional text-based ones. Also, having journald authenticate the process that is sending it log entries, and the log sealing capability, are two features that can…

Being able to boot a server with a 'live USB image'; mount root, and inspect the logs to see what happened are not possible when you got a binary blob for a log. When things have really fucked up, you need the 'ease of access that plain-text log files provides.

If your live USB image is from this decade, it will almost certainly come with journald for reading the logs. If it doesn't, why choose such a bad live USB image?
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