The thing is, the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work.
They didn't used to "just work" like that before systemd.
System boot is faster. I can have fewer things started up in the background, and instead have them start up when needed. Restarting services works consistently. Every application doesn't have its own bespoke and half baked management scripts which don't work half the time. They don't all have to invent their own daemonization support and logging; you just log to the journal.
And that's just core systemd. Things like systemd-resolved give me proper support for split-DNS when using VPNs. systemd-networkd gives me consistent, powerful configurable networking setup that works across distros.
Is it perfect? No, I do still have some complaints with it. But it's a hell of a lot better than what it's replacing. I wouldn't ever go back to sysvinit or upstart, and many other parts of systemd are compelling alternatives to the things they replace, like systemd-networkd over ifupdown.
>the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work
sorry, no, at least in any meaningful sense, because init already just worked for me.
and when something didn't, I could find how to fix it in a way that was transparent and I understood and could even modify or make better, without being connected to the internet looking for cargo cult incantations on stack overflow
My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended, and unexplained/unexplainable changes to the order of boot of some components. For the former I have given up playing whackamole with all the timeouts you need to reconfigure, for the latter I didn't even try because I know that there's something peculiar about my setup that will never work nicely with systemd, there's simply not enough systems configured like that for upstream to care.
I have accepted this new reality, but I know that before systemd I was able to fix any highly customised setup of mine, now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.
> now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.
I think this right here hits at the crux of the issue.
There are people who like systemd because it's integration-tested with itself and its own defaults, so if you never change those defaults you don't have many problems.
Then there are people who don't like systemd because if you do have to change any of its defaults, it often doesn't go well. And, of course, the latter behavior as a box users are expected to live in is poisonous, because everyone is being conditioned to be passive and uniform.
Plenty of people changes systemd configuration all the time and it just goes fine. You live in fantasy.
Even op is basically saying: “my issue with systemd is that I dislike the timeout configuration of some services but I stubbornly refuse to change these configurable timeout durations because it would show that the problem was myself and I prefer blaming systemd.”
It takes no time whatsoever to get a boot graph with each services name and starting time. That’s an actual feature documented in the manual of systemd which solves OP issue. But of course it would require actually understanding something new and everything new is bad, isn’t it?
> Plenty of people changes systemd configuration all the time and it just goes fine. You live in fantasy.
"since I have never experienced what you say, it must be fantasy"
> Even op is basically saying: “my issue with systemd is that I dislike the timeout configuration of some services but I stubbornly refuse to change these configurable timeout durations because it would show that the problem was myself and I prefer blaming systemd.”
This is a perfect example of toxicity; I have been successfully using systemd for years and I am entitled to point out what I dislike, I do not have to love everything of it, it's not a religion nor a cult. Your reply tells more about yourself than the topic of the discussion at hand.
> It takes no time whatsoever to get a boot graph with each services name and starting time. That’s an actual feature documented in the manual of systemd which solves OP issue. But of course it would require actually understanding something new and everything new is bad, isn’t it?
You're missing the point, the problem is not changing timeouts but preventing failure and achieving an overall deterministic behaviour out of your system, without ignoring failures. But I refuse further eating these baits, you seem more interested in creating some flames rather than having constructive discussions.
> I have been successfully using systemd for years
You are writing that you have been unsuccessfully using systemd for years because of the annoying timeout. I'm replying that it's entierely your fault because it takes seconds to make these timeouts disappear.
That's not toxicity. That's calling out some non sense on the internet.
> And, of course, the latter behavior as a box users are expected to live in is poisonous, because everyone is being conditioned to be passive and uniform.
No, it's not, this assumes that the other camp are all idiots.
Mainstream distros should be rock solid and boring.
Linux never got anywhere with the standard distros because they're all so different.
Tinkering is a different mindset (and has a different place) than professional engineering work.
Systemd is basically engineering, SysV & co. were basically old school tinkering/hacking.
In the same vein, don't be creative with bolt sizes. Be creative with what those bolts allow you to achieve. Be creative at a higher level. That should be the nature of humanity.
> Linux never got anywhere with the standard distros because they're all so different.
This is eliding the difference in what you want to be standardized.
Take system logging for example. You definitely want some standard interface to do it so all the different daemons and things can implement it once regardless of which system logger the distribution is using. But once it passes that data to the other program, it's under a different dominion of control which should operate as a black box with respect to the program generating the data and the rest of the system.
Because that's how you prevent ossification -- which is engineering. You want to make it so the other component can be improved or substituted. One system logger is designed to store the logs on a central server instead of the local machine, another supports modules so other people can easily write log-parsing scripts. And when you come up with a new idea for a third, you don't have to be on the systemd team to publish an independent implementation that other people can use as a drop-in replacement, instead of (not in addition to) the default one, without requiring it to be separately integrated with a dozen moving targets in the systemd repository.
What you're trying to do is to allow this:
> In the same vein, don't be creative with bolt sizes. Be creative with what those bolts allow you to achieve. Be creative at a higher level.
You want to standardize the bolt sizes, i.e. the interfaces between components. What you explicitly don't want is to replace bolts with having everything epoxied together.
But that's what happens when you e.g. integrate the logging system with the service manager, which is the sort of thing people are complaining about.
We've had Unix for what, close to 55 years now? Nobody standardized and got widespread adoption for those standards, which BTW, especially when you look at corporate interests regarding the web, are easily sabotaged.
So I'd rather have the epoxy open source standard than no standard.
There are things that systemd does better than SysV and other things it does worse and you can want it to stop doing the things that are worse while still doing the things that are better.
There, done. That's all the timeouts you'll ever need. Go and complain to your distribution they are setting the wrong defaults, even desktop environment(s) already recommend[1] setting it to a low value.
You can stop hating on systemd now, everything you needed was in `man systemd-system.conf` all along.
> There, done. That's all the timeouts you'll ever need. Go and complain to your distribution they are setting the wrong defaults, even desktop environment(s) already recommend[1] setting it to a low value.
You can stop hating on systemd now, everything you needed was in `man systemd-system.conf` all along.
Here's another example of cultism repressing any dissent.
Let me make a bullet points list for you:
* I do not hate systemd, I have never stated that, I have been using it for possibly longer time than you and love most of it
* I am entitled to write about what I don't like, you can disagree and move on, we all need to do this exercise on a daily basis
* there are cases where systemd will change the order of dependencies during boot, that's by design because systemd works in a way that tries to achieve states. It's not really enforcing a graph with order
* in a sufficiently complex system, this constitutes a source of non-determinism and it is basically undebuggable: you see the failure, learn about the corresponding configuration, change it and hope that you did the correct change (you have no way to test this until next random occurrence)
That's all, it's based on my experience; I write plenty units on a regular basis and 99% of the times everything goes very well.
> My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended
That’s an issue with a daemon, not systemd. Anyone who used NFS saw that routinely on SysV init during the era when Red Hat distributions shut down networking before ensuring that the network mounts were unmounted.
I regularly see it also on a system not using NFS, and it seems related to console seats. Never went to the bottom of it because it's sporadic/non-reproducible.
Yes - my point was simply that the shut down process tells things to stop but most sysadmins have war stories about that not working well for all kinds of things.
The problem is that there isn’t a universally correct way to do this: if my web server has hung, SIGKILL is what I want to get the system back in a usable state as quickly as possible but if it’s a file system, database, etc. you have questions like losing data which aren’t trivial to answer (e.g. if it’s a transient error, waiting for it flush is good but if my storage had an irrecoverable error I might want write off that data as lost and focus on getting the service back up).
I've got the waiting ages for shutdown feature on reboot, so I tend to force reboot it. I never bothered trying to fix it because firstly I don't know where to start and secondly I only reboot after updates once every few months.
well, systemd is doing things that init did not do, so that's not a replication, but if I kill something, it should stay dead till I restart it; if I dismount a volume, it should stay dismounted; if I set the permissions on something, they should not reset back. Don't treat me like I'm the anomoly.
gives me #1 source of troubles on any desktop computer I have ever ran under the systemd era. I feel like resolved is specifically designed to be removed from fresh installations, sort of like a transparent peel on new devices' screens.
In my strong opinion, resolved is the most brain damaged part of systemd. Unconfigurable, unmaintainable, unmanageable.
> systemd-networkd gives me
Oh, there is no point in learning systemd-networkd. By the time you do Ubuntu folks will swap the set of the network initialization tools once again and you'll have to start over. Thankfully, 'apt install ifupdown' still works kind of like `apt install upstart` worked a few years ago.
Random example. They randomly broke suspect-then-hibernate then the community manager gaslit people into trying to make them believe they don’t actually need the feature in the way it’s used and then silently acknowledged that their fix is broken after all.
This is a common pattern by the way. But easily the most irritating thing for me is the simple issue that you used to be able to just go to /var/log/lastlog to see what failed during the last boot and that just the other day I had to spend hours figuring what broke in the system that made journalctl not log properly. In the end I had to reinstall all currently installed packages.
I don't understand how you can read someone telling you that they want to suspend and then hibernate after a set duration, but A) not understand why this would be desirable, B) not understand that this is compatible with also hibernating at low battery, and C) not understand your own lack of comprehension.
> The linked GitHub issue is one of the most aggravating exchanges
Hyperbolic much?
Because if you actually read the whole issue, here we have one maintainer acting out of line of refusing to process the issue until another one (Yu Watanabe) interjects, says there is an issue and actually commit a patchset adding the option asked for.
I cannot think of any exchange I've read that aggravated me more than this one.
I'm hedging my bets with "one of" because there might be something I've forgotten, but that specific series of events is like reading a transcript of The Trial if it happened in real life. It is seriously extremely annoying to me and I'm both intrigued and concerned that it doesn't even rank in your list.
Yeah, that's pretty shitty behaviour, invalidating all the good-faith feedback and going so far as to call it "trolling"?? Ridiculous. There's no excuse to be so hostile when handling bug reports.
So there was a bug and bad interaction and everyone on non-rolling system didn't even notice, because it's been fixed in 2 months? (Nov to Jan) It sucks, but it's been fixed for almost 2 years at this point.
For the last boot you can use "journalctl -b -1" as long as you enabled persistent logs. If you ended up reinstalling everything, I don't think we can say whether that was a systemd related issue or not.
