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Systemd 252

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Re: Systemd 252

#91

Post by lakomen »

Octabrain wrote: post #50
Timja wrote: post #45

I despise systemd. Having shell scripts that you can read and edit makes so much more sense. Putting a script in a directory to have it run at startup makes sense. Systemd's approach of "registering a service" is hell. Having logs in plain text is beautiful. Having to use special software to read logs is hell.

You can still have your wonderful script but in the case of systemd, you delegate the execution lifecycle of that script to a unit, which, IMHO, is a great abstraction compared to the mess of having to deal with the status of the service from the script itself. You simply throw the unit file into directory, then enable it. Your script does its thing, systemd deals with when to run it, in which runlevel etc About the…

> journalctl is really great too

until you're forced to run a rescue system without systemd and try to read logs. And don't say that it doesn't happen, because that situation is 99%.

Re: Systemd 252

#92

Post by encryptluks2 »

blueflow wrote: post #90
boncho wrote: 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.

"rock-solid". Right now my mom is nagging me to fix her Ubuntu laptop, which doesn't shutdown anymore because some of the units got messed up. I'm at the verge of telling her to install windows.

That is a really simple fix. Sounds like one of the units is hanging. This actually shouldn't prevent shutdown but may make it hang for like 2 minutes.

Re: Systemd 252

#95

Post by esarbe »

boncho wrote: 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.

Absolutely.

I've started managing my user services using systemd --user and portable services and it's just amazing how well the individual components work together to create fully isolated, containerized, per-user services.

I'm lovin' it and I'm not missing the hot mess of the dozens of shell scripts that I needed before.

Re: Systemd 252

#96

Post by esarbe »

europeanguy wrote: post #3
boncho wrote: 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?

From my experience this was never much more than a very vocal minority.

Re: Systemd 252

#97

Post by captainmuon »

About removing support for what they call split-usr and unmerged-usr: Why does a init system and daemon manager even need suppport for a certain directory layout, shouldn't it be agnostic? Having a separate usr-space saved my bacon in the past a couple of times.

The thing I dislike most about Systemd is that it leads to homogenisation, where to me, running Linux is about choice.

Re: Systemd 252

#98

Post by biorach »

HNDV wrote: post #74
stevefan1999 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I almost never saw anyone using Alpine as the infrastructural distro for their, say like desktop environment akin to Manjaro and Fedora. Without systemd, bootstrapping a complicated desktop environment would be a hot mess. Well, maybe you would say Alpine is not intented to run heavyweight stuff like that and is mostly focused on security and containers. That's exactly what Alpine is, the OpenBSD of Linux distros…

>never saw anyone using Alpine as the infrastructural distro for their, say like desktop environment akin to Manjaro and Fedora Alpine runs musl libc. This makes it buggy with all sorts of software that rely on glibc-isms, that makes it incompatible with proprietary drivers like NVIDIA and make it harder to run proprietary/binary software on the userland. musl is developed by people with that sort of break-everything…

That's an inaccurate and quite uncharitable representation of what musl is about.

Re: Systemd 252

#99

Post by encryptluks2 »

HNDV wrote: post #37
europeanguy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>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…

I think that is an overstatement. I use systemd but there is legitimate criticism and even a questionable conflict of interest in the creator now working for the competition. People working against the best interest of the community is a real threat that shouldn't simply be ignored. However, so far systemd has worked out alright for me so I can't complain too much but the documentation is still lacking in certain areas and so doing things that are easy to understand with a traditional script based RC can become frustrating when you are trying to figure out the systemd-way to do things.

Re: Systemd 252

#100

Post by tux3 »

europeanguy wrote: post #3
boncho wrote: 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?

A couple years ago, absolutely. To decide whether to generally hate systemd, and with what intensity, you should follow a curve that decreases proportionally with how long ago the change was made, and that starts as high as the multiplication of how much churn it causes times how old the thing it replaced was, all of which is of course multiplied again against the buggyness curve

When pipewire replaced pulse, despite pulse being well established and a core desktop component, there was very little churn and few bugs. People not impacted did not mind at all that a major component was changed, or that it did many things and bundled three completely different protocols into one, arguably not very reminiscent of Unix Philosophy™

I would confidently predict that a change as large as systemd, to a component as old, and that causes as much churn (rewriting, relearning) would follow a roughly similar hate curve, only distinguishing itself by whether it was more buggy or less buggy than the predecessor.

It's churn people hate, not change. The lesson I learned is that you can make large changes to the system, it's only hated when it forces humans changes.

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