I use plasma, BTW

  • @[email protected]
    29•2 years ago

    I am not interested in being preached at unless you have a workable alternative and a good reason why should I switch over.

  • @[email protected]English
    8•2 years ago

    I also want to use my computer and not think about init systems. That’s a large part of the reason why I don’t like systemd.

    • Laurel Raven
      4•2 years ago

      Personally, I’m a fan of my init system starting things up and not getting involved in literally every other part of my system beyond that

  • cally [he/they]English
    4•2 years ago

    i use swayfx and runit

    i don’t like systemd because it has a lot of stuff that i don’t think should be built-in, for example, why have systemd timer when cron already exists?

    runit is nice for me because it’s simple and i like activating services by just soft-linking files to /var/service instead of using some fancy tool

      • The Octonaut
        1•2 years ago

        Yeah, I wish someone released software to my exact requirements out of spite. They can release it out of race hate if they like

      • @[email protected]
        1•2 years ago

        Wtf, I didn’t know that Libreboot wasn’t fully libre any more. I agree with the FSF’s ideology here. The only reason to run Libreboot over Coreboot was 100% FOSS, and if that’s not the case, then there is no point to it anymore.

        Thanks for mentioning the other projects, I’ll take a look

      • ZephrC
        1•2 years ago

        The point isn’t just pragmatism. The point is that you’re running closed source software either way. Even ideologically, running out of date closed source software because it’s built into the chip isn’t actually any better than running a current version of the same software from a drive. Maybe that distinction made sense in the 90s when mircocode updates weren’t a thing most people dealt with, although honestly even back then it was a little weird. Now it’s complete garbage. The FSF is an important organization, which makes it all the more important to call them out when they’re wasting time and money on stupid nonsense.

  • @[email protected]
    23•2 years ago

    I just use systemctl because I know how to use it and know all the ins and outs of any bullshit I might encounter. No way I’m switching. I like not being stumped on issues I can’t fix for weeks.

    • @[email protected]English
      9•2 years ago

      This was an excellent listen, thank you for the link. I had no idea what was involved in it when I started, nor the roles of initd and launchd before it and what systemd was trying to replace.

      The funny thing is that the guy giving the talk, Benno Rice, is primarily FreeBSD/openRC and not Linux, so he seemed fairly agnostic in presenting the various sides, not just from Unix and then Linux but also from the Apple viewpoint, who have also been playing a kind of parallel but separate role in this.

      Very cool. Not a beginner level talk, definitely, but there was nothing I couldn’t figure out coming from Windows/Mac tech. Really informative, thank you again.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•2 years ago

      I’m from the era of untangling hacky init scripts from every flavour of Linux to get something to work or add something new. Systemd was like coming up for air.

  • @[email protected]
    5•2 years ago

    At the level I care about, which is “I want this daemon to start when I boot up the computer”, systemd is much better. I can write a ~5 line unit file that will do exactly that, and I’ll be done.

    With init, I needed to copy-paste a 50-line shell script that I don’t really understand except that a lot of it seemed to be concerned with pid files. Honestly, I fail to see how that’s better…

      • @[email protected]
        3•2 years ago

        The only arguments against I have seen so for is systemd does a lot more than just handing system startup (systemd-resolved is one such example) and files that was previously stored as text now require systemd’s own tool to read (journalctl?).

        So not the actual startup function, just everything else.

        • @[email protected]
          2•2 years ago

          Based on the video someone posted, it’s not very portable either.

          I feel that little part of my brain that wants to add yet another standard itching. Easily starting something at boot is good, but I don’t see why that has to come with loss of modularity.

          • @[email protected]
            1•2 years ago

            Afaik they don’t care about being portable to instead focus as much as possible on being fast and whatever

        • Dave.
          5•2 years ago

          Mmm I have a general dislike of systemd because it doesn’t adhere to the “do one thing and do it well” approach of traditional Unix systems.

          It’s a big old opaque blob of software components that work nicely together but don’t play well with others, basically.

          Edit: but it solved a particular set of problems in serverspace and it’s bled over to the consumer Linux side of things and generally I’m ok with it if it simplifies things for people. I just don’t want a monoculture to spring up and take root across all of Linux as monocultures aren’t great for innovation or security.

      • @[email protected]English
        7•2 years ago

        There’s a lot of improvements with Plasma 6 and NVIDIA 545 on my RTX 3060 Ti, so that’s something to look forward to.

        • @[email protected]
          1•2 years ago

          It’s getting better for sure, but there are still a lot of issues for me (Plasma 5, Nvidia 545). I think I might stick with it for now until I run into some major dealbreaker for me. Right now I can only game without glitches if I limit my monitors refresh rate to 60hz and even then you will run into issues.

    • @[email protected]
      19•2 years ago

      Oversimplified: It’s the service that handles starting and stopping of other services, including starting them in the right order after boot. Many people hate it because of astrology and supersticion. Allegedly it’s “bloated”. But still it has become the standard on many (most?) distros, effectively replacing init.

      I like init. It’s simple. I like systemd as well. It’s convenient. Beyond that i don’t have very strong feelings on the matter.

      Also, see important answer by topinambour-rex.

        • @[email protected]
          7•2 years ago

          Now that you mention it, I find systemd messing with my DNS settings incredibly annoying as well, so I can’t help but agree on that point. At this production system at work, when troubleshooting, I often need to alter DNS between local, local (in chroot), some other server in the same cluster, and a public one. This is done across several service restarts and the occasional reboot. Not being able to trust that resolv.conf remains as I left it is frustrating.

          On the newest version of our production image, systemd-resolvd is disabled.

    • cally [he/they]English
      13•2 years ago

      • systemd is an init system commonly used in distros like Linux Mint, Arch, Manjaro, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.

      • init systems have a process id of 1 and manage services like a login manager, network, firewall service, etc.

      • a process id is assigned to every process in a linux system.

      the average user usually doesn’t worry about the init system, although more experienced/techy users may care about it.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•2 years ago

        Thank you, Callyral. I didn’t know either. But now I’m trying to learn Linux again after 30 years of not touching it, so this is helpful.

        If I may ask an additional possibly stupid question (coming from Windows/Mac): as an init system in Linux, after you get past BIOS and POST at power up, is systemd also responsible for the initial OS software boot process (the “bootstrap” or Boot Manager in DOS/Windows) or is that another process altogether?

        Or, asked another way, does systemd load the Linux kernel, and if not, what does?

        Just so you know, I have no real skin in this game yet; I’m just trying to figure out where systemd starts and stops so that I can follow the [endless] debate, lol.

        • @[email protected]
          7•2 years ago

          Or, asked another way, does systemd load the Linux kernel, and if not, what does?

          Immediately after the BIOS/POST, the first thing that starts is the boot loader. This is usually a piece of software called GRUB. There’s a part of GRUB in the Master Boot Record on the drive, that the loads the rest of GRUB from /boot. /boot has to be a basic partition so that the MBR code can mount it, so for example if you use something a bit fancier (like LVM) then you’ll usually have a separate small ext2 or FAT partition just for /boot.

          GRUB shows a list of available kernels, and other operating systems (if any are installed), based on a config in /boot.

          Once you select a kernel to boot (or wait a few seconds for it to automatically choose the default option), it starts loading the kernel. There is a small disk image called the “initial ramdisk” in /boot, usually with a name like initrd or initramfs. This is a small ramdisk that contains all the drivers needed to mount your root partition - for example, drive drivers (NVMe, SATA, etc), file system drivers (ext4, ZFS, XFS, etc), LVM, RAID drivers if needed, and so on. If the root disk is on an NFS network share (not as common any more, but still doable), it also needs to contain network drivers for your network card. It also contains a few basic utilities, usually provided by BusyBox.

          Some Linux distros (such as Debian) build a custom initramfs, whereas others (like Fedora) have a generic one containing all possible drivers.

          The initial ramdisk then mounts the root partition and hands control over to the Linux kernel, which starts actually booting the OS. The very first process the kernel starts running is the init process, which these days is usually systemd but can be a different one like sysvinit or runit.

          Hope that helps :)

          • @[email protected]English
            2•2 years ago

            Okay, yeah. This makes much more sense now. I really appreciate it. I’ve been seeing the GRUB menu in LiveUSB boots but didn’t understand that it was part of the initial boot process for general Linux systems (for whatever reason I had it stuck in my head that it was just for USB booting). And you’ve placed systemd exactly where it makes sense to me as the init process for that OS.

            That is extremely helpful. Thank you so much for taking the time to write the entire boot order, because it just got crystal clear for me. Much appreciated!