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Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

devuan.org

151–160 of 221 posts

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#151
post #27

Love/hate systemd as I might, it's been rock solid everywhere I've used it, and I've used it heavily. It has it's quirks, as does the init-scripts that came before, and launchd on OSX (not sure what the modern equivalent is for MacOS). However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log. All things being equal I'd rather deal with human readable files.

I'm probably in the minority for preferring journald's binary logging, especially alleviating the need for things like log-rotate, which I have always fought issues with. I like how RedHat distros have it setup, where journald collects the logs, but rsyslog is there parsing them into the traditional /var/log/messages and /var/log/secure, so you get some logs in plain text as well as being able to send them along to an rsyslog server the traditional way.

I haven't run into a situation with corrupt binary logs, and any crashed system I've booted with a rescue disk I can connect to the binary logs from the rescue distro's journalctl. That being said, I imagine one bad experience with a corrupt log or a non-booting system I can't get logs from would change my mind pretty quickly, but that hasn't been the case for almost a decade, so *shrug*

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#152
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's why Slackware and Gentoo have a much larger userbase than Debian :-D

Last time I checked, ChromeOS is a gentoo derivative that doesn't use systemd, so yes this but unironically.

Huh, TIL.

> ChromeOS (sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS) is a proprietary operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS operating system (which itself is derived from Gentoo Linux)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Support musl 2. Become mainstream with musl distros 3. Become dependency in practical terms 4. Then even software optimized for musl-based distros has to deal and support systemd

But do you have any proof for beyond #1? Seems like a far jump here, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Nope. It's my view of the situation and I'm confident that will be the case. Not that it's an evil plan. Just a nature taking its course. This is how I see it.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#154
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can use and like and still complain about things that should be better or were better under old. systemd solved a ton of headaches but also added few more, like inability to express "just shut the fucking system down, you won't have power in 5 minutes" for servers connected to UPS. > And writing a systemd unit is pretty easy, contrary to the old bash script mess. We had thousands of lines of "simple" sysv init sc…

> inability to express "just shut the fucking system down, you won't have power in 5 minutes" for servers connected to UPS. What about "systemctl --force --force poweroff" ?

With two “--force” options, that is essentially equivalent to “echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger”, isn’t it? I would think that one “--force” would have the actually desired effect.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#155
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK you're missing the historical context here. To make this story extremely short, the author of Systemd was already known for another project that was causing problems to Linux users but was shipped early. And when Systemd was released, it has several issues, too, so some distros like Debian withheld the switch. But at some point the folks at Red Hat decided to tie Systemd to the login mechanism for Gnome. I don't b…

Citing PulseAudio adds nothing here. Distros decided to ship it early, just like systemd later ... that choice wasn’t pushed by Poettering. Dragging in an earlier project without making an actual technical or governance argument is just character framing. It’s not evidence, it’s a smear.

No, I decided to include it to explain the emotional response to Systemd. I didn't mean to offend anyone. That stuff didn't work and broken things were pushed on people again, that's why some revolted.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had choices before, you still have choices, how is that EEE? There never been more distributions available.

You had choices not to use $technology that Microsoft embraced, extended and then extinguished, how is that not EEE?

EEE is about taking existing standards/software and making it eventually incompatible with FOSS. That's very different from creating a new thing, and asking people to use that. AFAIK, they're not replacing anything (but maybe I missed something), so I don't see it as the same as what Microsoft did back in the day.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legible, discoverable, debuggable. They listed the commands the computer needed to run, in the order it needed to run them, to get the system running. It was absolutely beautiful. And then LSB came along and broke it, and as a result of that systemd now manages my home directory and cron tables. Shame, really.

Sure but not reliable, robust, integrated. Fine for 80s mainframes... not so great for modern laptops.

What could be more robust than that? There's basically nothing to break

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had choices not to use $technology that Microsoft embraced, extended and then extinguished, how is that not EEE?

EEE is about taking existing standards/software and making it eventually incompatible with FOSS. That's very different from creating a new thing, and asking people to use that. AFAIK, they're not replacing anything (but maybe I missed something), so I don't see it as the same as what Microsoft did back in the day.

I think it's similar. We have a big powerful company pushing their solution, pushing more and more software to depend on that solution, so people who want to exercise their choice not to have an increasingly uphill battle to do so.

That doesn't seem so different from what Microsoft used to do, as even back then there was always choice if people decided to get together and exercise it, but practically in both cases it's an uphill battle.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us starting using Linux before systemd was a thing, and you get used to what you use, so when something new appears that are trying (well, in this case "tried and succeeded at") to replace a bunch of stuff, there is a natural push-back against it. I think systemd also took a relatively non-unixy approach, where it's a big stack to adopt, rather than individual programs that work together well. Typically, we p…

Initially i hated systemd for the change it bought and lennarts behavior, but today I'm wiser. Today i hate systemd for its bad debugability (edit unit & daemon-reload loops), the lockups that happen whenever there is a fifo in the wrong place, and the processes that systemd spawns with no apparent related unit and without means to mask them. And the difficult to disable suspends on machines that never had any busine…

Could you please expand bit more about those processes that systemd spawns without units?

Cgroups in Linux kernel, and systemd-cgls tool should let you trace every process to a source

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