> 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.
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.