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Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

blog.tjll.net

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Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be fine with it, until I started writing my own software tools, then looking at how to actually do stuff with systemd and I'm like, nope nope nope nope. At some point when I have space for a new project I'm going to migrate from Arch to Obarun, which uses a modern update on the excellent daemontools to provide init. When systemd works it's mostly fine, when it breaks, path of least resistance is often to re…

This doesn't match my experience at all. For the life of me, I cannot imagine what you are talking about, what any of your issues are. Did you file any tickets, or report any issues? What about "actually doing stuff with systems" was "nope nope nope nope"? What situations did systemd break in? What did you try before giving up to reinstall the OS? Thise fud train is cast aspersions, no meat.

+1, systemd is very usable, and works. I would really not go back to what was before

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#82
post #19

I personally love the init/service/unit-file portion of systemd and have few complaints. It has a lot of powerful features for security, cron, etc that are very simple to use. I also really like journald. The parts I don’t really like are the half baked “ancillary” managers like resolvd, which are frankly baffling to use and tend to make simple things needlessly difficult.

Hard disagree. Name resolution feels like a solved problem, so why fix it if it isn't broken? But that's just like the old init & logging systems. They mostly worked, and yes it was annoying to relearn a new way of doing things. But the new way is better. I've got software that works with resolvconf, NetworkManager and resolved. I definitely prefer resolved. Yes, the cost of switching likely exceeds the benefits for…

The older init systems were incredibly frail and often did not work. The reason is because Bash, as much as we all love it, is actually super mega ass. It's very bug-prone and actually one of the least portable languages ever invented, in practice. Because you can't, or shouldn't, call to any other binary from within Bash, otherwise you risk your portability. Now your script won't work the same on other platforms, or even the same platform with slightly different configuration.

But um... yeah... calling to other binaries is the entire ethos of Bash. It's a shell, that's supposed to be all it does. Even getting a "true" value should be a call to another binary.

Unit files, despite being a bespoke format for one singular program, are actually more portable. Like, WAY more portable.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is so helpful for doing those kinds of tasks in the terminal that you only do a couple times a year and can never remember the exact incantation

You only need to look those things up once, put it in a snippets.txt file, and then search in the file when you need it.

I keep a per project file like that with common commands and related things.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#84
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudwatch fucking sucks. Plenty of log shippers can slurp journald. (Fluentd, filebeat, vector) Even ChromeOS uses it, even on devices that still use Upstart.

> Even ChromeOS uses it, even on devices that still use Upstart. I was curious about this, because I thought journald hard required systemd as pid 1, so I did a search, which promptly turned up https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/refer... - > Jounald is deprecated and is about to be removed.

Hmm couldn't exactly tell when it was removed, but it looks like it lasted maybe 3-4 years. This is the commit that added it to the upstart config.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/870...

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#85
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even ChromeOS uses it, even on devices that still use Upstart. I was curious about this, because I thought journald hard required systemd as pid 1, so I did a search, which promptly turned up https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/refer... - > Jounald is deprecated and is about to be removed.

Hmm couldn't exactly tell when it was removed, but it looks like it lasted maybe 3-4 years. This is the commit that added it to the upstart config. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/870...

Fascinating. An initscript for journald is a special kind of cursed that I didn't expect to read today:)

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#86

My view is pragmatic: if you are managing the server and I am a user, then use systemd if you want to. If it’s my responsibility then I will use a non-systemd distribution or if I have a choice, FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is many great things, but ... a pragmatic choice?

And powers zillions of unsung, critical infrastructure tasks.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#87
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted but you're absolutely right. The fact that Cloudwatch doesn't support journald is a major, major fail on AWS' part. It's not like this is new or obscure software.

I'm just surprised anyone wants to use cloudwatch when they don't need to. It is expensive, and far from the best observability platform.

It's always there by default. That's the only reason I've ever seen it used.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#88
post #40

I was pro-systemd at the time of the controversial discussions. I still think it's a net positive relative to what was there before. But personally speaking, it's only the core of the software (service management) that improved things for me. The other things (timers, journald) I either ignore or don't like, but perhaps they're useful for distributions.

I've been quite happy with -boot, -networkd, -resolved. -logind too, what a powerful upshift in routing input. I forget what but timesync is missing a lot of nice to haves. But ditching grub for something much much much more manageable & a joy to use. Networkd and resolved have both had a lot of nice clear straightforward options, and I love how systemd unit files snap together for these networking concerns. Journald…

systemd-resolved is a godsend.

I run, at home and at work, vpns and having a good way to configure split-horizon dns is incredibly useful.

At a previous company we were able to ship a binary that would automatically configure a bunch of company settings on developers' linux laptops and got VPN configurations working with split-horizon dns very easily.

prior to this, doing split-horizon dns on linux basically meant running dnsmasq (!!!) on every linux laptop

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#89
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be fine with it, until I started writing my own software tools, then looking at how to actually do stuff with systemd and I'm like, nope nope nope nope. At some point when I have space for a new project I'm going to migrate from Arch to Obarun, which uses a modern update on the excellent daemontools to provide init. When systemd works it's mostly fine, when it breaks, path of least resistance is often to re…

> when it breaks, path of least resistance is often to reinstall the OS Can you elaborate how do you even break this? Adding a systemd unit cannot really break much on systemd itself. Unless you’re messing with internal systemd stuff, I am not sure what is even there to break.

At the moment, on this machine I'm using, audio just doesn't work. Dunno why. Tried a few different things to fix it, no dice. Trying to troubleshoot is made enormously more difficult by the complexity of systemd. If I had a simpler system I could run it all the way back to the source, but really, I can't be bothered, I don't really need audio on this machine atm.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be fine with it, until I started writing my own software tools, then looking at how to actually do stuff with systemd and I'm like, nope nope nope nope. At some point when I have space for a new project I'm going to migrate from Arch to Obarun, which uses a modern update on the excellent daemontools to provide init. When systemd works it's mostly fine, when it breaks, path of least resistance is often to re…

This doesn't match my experience at all. For the life of me, I cannot imagine what you are talking about, what any of your issues are. Did you file any tickets, or report any issues? What about "actually doing stuff with systems" was "nope nope nope nope"? What situations did systemd break in? What did you try before giving up to reinstall the OS? Thise fud train is cast aspersions, no meat.

You probably use a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. Maybe do some light coding in an IDE. I do not. I run window manager only, i3, with a really stripped down toolset. I like the idea of knowing my system in and out. My current project is writing my own shell. It can switch between command mode and ruby REPL with ctrl-z.

You mention filing tickets / reporting issues, sorry, that means contributing to a project. I'm not wholly opposed to doing that, but I have to like the project first. And there's nothing to like about systemd.

You go do that if you like it so much. My guess is you simply won't, and will just keep using other people's software without a care in the world, thinking this kind of online warriorship is actually helping anything.

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