• Tja@programming.dev
    6·
    1 day ago

    I dislike journalctl more than systemd. And I don’t get what’s the advantage of systemctl vs previous solutions, why would that of all things make one reconsider.

    I miss rc.local and crontabs. Now if you excuse me I have a cloud to yell at.

    • Hawke@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 day ago

      The only advantage I see is that it actually seems to keep a better handle on the status of the process/service. The old-style unit scripts would often get out of sync and not realize that a process had died, or if they did they would repeatedly respawn a service that would just die again. Maybe that was less of a problem in later years than I experienced earlier, but it was there.

      The whole init.d system felt very ad-hoc with every script working a little bit differently, giving different output styles, etc.

    • somenonewho@feddit.org
      5·
      1 day ago

      I feel that. I’ve used Linux before systemd but when I went into the “nitty gritty” by using arch systemd had just been implemented and everything I learned about startup services init etc. was systemd based. When I started my career working in servers they were redhat/CentOS so still systemd and when I switched jobs Debian already had made the switch so (most of) the systems at my new job were also systemd based. Of course I learned the basics of init files and even some rc.d but systemd still makes the most sense to me and like you say it’s “comfy”.

      • wabasso@lemmy.caEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Can you elaborate? Are there a lot of security holes in systemd? (Genuine question)

        • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
          33·
          2 days ago

          I’m pretty sure their arguments boil down to “big company bad” as systemd is developed by Red Hat. Putting a single entity’s products in charge of several basic functions of the computer (like booting, init, daemons, networking) is seen as a bad idea, especially Red Hat which disgraced itself by making the RHEL source code available only to customers (which does not violate the license), but so far I don’t know of any solid evidence of security holes caused by either incompetence or malice.

      • vinyl@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 day ago

        I’ve been waiting for 4 years to be part of one, but it has yet to become a reality 😔

  • somegeek@programming.dev
    22·
    2 days ago

    SystemD works great, but the corporations and politics behind it will ruin Linux if they fully take over. They are already optimizing heavily for IoT just because IBM is heavily focused on IoT

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 days ago

      I’m pretty sure IBM hasn’t focussed on IoT in a long time

      (In the sense that I used to work there and know they’ve both reduced investment in, and fully removed, some parts of their portfolio regarding IoT)

      • somegeek@programming.dev
        3·
        2 days ago

        Just search IBM IoT and look at IBM acquisitions in the last decade.

        Everyone “used to work for that company” on the internet. And even if you used to work there it doesn’t mean you know anything about their business. IBM is more of a Holding now. Like Volkswagen. Just because someone works at audi it doesn’t mean they know anything about Lamborghini.

        https://unixdigest.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
          10·
          2 days ago

          I’m well aware of IBM IoT and their acquisitions, but I’m also aware that most of that stuff happened around 2016-2018, and since then that part of the business has been shrunk down and sold off.

          Believe what you want. I did work in IBM IoT, but what do I know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

          If you read your own article, you’ll also notice that it doesn’t mention IoT even once. It talks about embedded use cases, which is not the same as IoT. Are you sure you’re not just throwing together unrelated topics?

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Anyone got a good tutorial/guide fir SystemD?

    Figure I may as well try to wrap my head around it if it’s supposedly going to murder me in my sleep or whatever.

      • probably2high@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        And if you’re not a 50 year-old Linux admin, Arch wiki.

        Edit: don’t be put off by the Arch wiki if you don’t use Arch. 99% of the time, Linux is Linux, and you can follow it for just about anything other than package management.

        • vinyl@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 day ago

          That too but arch wiki sometimes doesn’t list all the possibilities the program can do or not, skill issue if you can’t read.

          • probably2high@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 day ago

            skill issue

            I fully own that. But I like the logical ordering of the page sections on the wiki, and if anything is unclear or info is missing there–which it is pretty rare–I’ll hit up man in desperation

  • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
    46·
    2 days ago

    Systemd-boot and the service files and timers are pretty neat. Works fine as an init too I guess

    • wabasso@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Those are the features I’m most interested in. Do you have a tutorial / resource you can recommend?

      The man pages are, as with most Linux, technically sufficient. Just very hard to digest if I don’t have four hours of interrupted time.

      • vinyl@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 day ago

        From experience when I look for something “easier to digest” I end up spending more time tinkering and fucking about than just reading the man pages because the latter usually had a lot more context about the software and any other weird quirks.

  • afb@lemmy.world
    45·
    2 days ago

    I don’t hate systemd, but I prefer OpenRC and usually use it on my Debian systems. My preference is purely vibes based though, and I think most of the anti-systemd arguments in common usage are a bit silly.

    • lengau@midwest.social
      34·
      2 days ago

      My biggest problem with systemd is that Red Hat has basically used it to push their-way-or-the-highway on many Linux distros. That said, in many situations systemd is better than what came before. Except systemd-networkd. It’s a PITA as far as I’m concerned.

      • Pasta Dental@sh.itjust.works
        18·
        2 days ago

        I see why that may not be an ideal position in an ideological sense, where every distro uses the same thing, but i see it the other way around: it’s a way to finally attempt to standardize Linux desktops. Having a standard desktop is crucial for mainstream adoption, because developers won’t bother supporting 4837 different combinations of software. This is the reason I am really excited for the future with flatpak, xdg-portals, systemd, pipewire, Wayland etc etc. This way the distro is no longer the platform, it’s the distro agnostic software stack that becomes the target platform. For example there’s no longer a need to support KDE’s file picker, and gnome’s file picker and xfce’s, you can just call the portal and it will (should) display a file picker. And if the user doesn’t have a supported environment (which the vast majority don’t) then the burden is on them for being different I guess :p

        • lengau@midwest.social
          4·
          2 days ago

          I like the standardisation of things. I don’t like that it’s glomming over everything to push Red Hat’s way of doing it and slow-walking proposals from other groups.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          The Nix package manager uses systemd for instatiating services for its packages, so you can switch between any setup with one command. Nix will stop and start all the units that were changed. While it’s a Nix feature, systemd is doing all the heavy lifting

        • lengau@midwest.social
          3·
          2 days ago

          I find it hard to deal with. I generally end up writing a new plan file and just rendering that to networkd.

  • mittorn@masturbated.one
    7·
    2 days ago

    @pewgar_seemsimandroid systemd has a lot of really good things…
    But it’s too complex for init process and even too complex for service manager. Many solib dependencies causes long start, big memory footprint and possibe security issues. Many things might be implemented in some separate services, running with restricted permissions and optionally disabled.
    initng was very similar to systemd, but was very simple and very much faster

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
    6·
    2 days ago

    Try to pass init=<path to any other init system> and you’ll see reduced RAM usage. Systemd is bloated.

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      15·
      2 days ago

      Hell, pass init=/bin/yes and you’ll see even more greatly reduced RAM usage!

      ❯ ps aux | grep /usr/lib/sys | awk '{print $6}' | sed 's/$/+/' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/+$/\n/' | bc
266516

      So that’s 260 MiB of RSS (assuming no shared libs which is certainly false) for:

      • Daemon manager
      • Syslog daemon
      • DNS daemon (which I need and would have to replace with dnsmasq if it did not exist)
      • udev daemon
      • network daemon
      • login daemon
      • VM daemon (ever hear of the principle of least privilege?)
      • user daemon manager (I STG anyone who writes a user daemon by doing nohup & needs to be fired into the sun. pkill is not the tool I should have to use to manage my user’s daemons)

      For comparison the web page I’m writing this on uses 117 MiB, about half. I’ll very gladly make the tradeoff of two sh.itjust.works tabs for one systemd suite. Or did you send that comment using curl because web browsers are bloated?

      For another comparison 200 MiB of RAM is less than two dollars at current prices. I don’t value my time so low that I’ll avoid spending two bucks by spend hours debugging whatever bash scripting spaghetti hell other init systems cling onto to avoid “bloat”. I’ve done it, don’t miss it.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 days ago

    I’ve used both runnit and systemD and I prefer systemD. Nothing against runnit and I love Void Linux.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    6·
    2 days ago

    Journald can pound a bag of dicks, it’s the worst.

    After a decade of justified hatred against systemd and avoiding it whenever I can I finally found a reason why I might start using it, so I will

    Still doesn’t mean that systemd is not bloatware with some horrible features built by a horrible main developer