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46% Positive

Analyzed from 1300 words in the discussion.

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#systemd#things#shell#scripts#default#why#more#something#init#system

Discussion (43 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

walrus01•about 2 hours ago
Default Debian Trixie out of the box configuration without changing any systemd config file allows gnu screen to work as it always has. There would have been great uproar and screeching if basic 'screen' detach and resume functionality had broken anywhere between Debian v11, v12 and v13, and it has not.

I'm assuming this is same for tmux but hasn't tested it.

Is there some major distro out there that has the config flag set the opposite of this by default?

yjftsjthsd-h•4 minutes ago
> Is there some major distro out there that has the config flag set the opposite of this by default?

It bit me on pop os (the Ubuntu derivative)

mike_hock•about 1 hour ago
> Default Debian Trixie out of the box configuration without changing any systemd config file allows gnu screen to work as it always has.

As mentioned in the second sentence of TFA. Debian enables linger by default.

graemep•about 2 hours ago
This is why i dislike systemd. Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.
Hendrikto•about 2 hours ago
In my experience, systemd is much better documented, way more consistent, and way more reliable than what came before.
lucideer•about 2 hours ago
I guess it depends on your source of info but I've found what came before was pretty comprehensively & accessibly documented, at least as well as systemd, which - while well documented - suffers from sprawl & overwhelm of the docs. There's just SO MUCH to grok in comparison.
BirAdam•about 2 hours ago
I never found systemd difficult, but I do find prior solutions to be simpler. An init script is easy, and the order is also easy. If people are accustomed to UNIX systems, the sysvinit is better. For people who never experienced those systems, systemd is their friend. No need to use UNIX tools when Systemd ships with batteries included.
7bit•33 minutes ago
No way. I was easily able to create Systemd units from 0-knowledge, where the init system remains a big black box riddled with question marks for a very long time. Very little was documented.
m0llusk•about 2 hours ago
Absolutely not the case. Even relatively simple real world uses involved collections of shell scripts to carefully mount or initialize services in just the right order and would often fail with weird and infrequent timing glitches. With systemd that all becomes explicit, so of course it is awkwardly verbose. That is the whole point and a huge upgrade.
po1nt•about 2 hours ago
Maybe, but the scale of systemd features is humongous. It better be well documented. You don't need a user manual for hammer, you do need one for hydraulic press.
nubinetwork•about 2 hours ago
> hydraulic press

What is there to know? It goes up and down, and don't stick your arm inside...

7bit•30 minutes ago
The scale is humongous? Syszemd is not one big thing. It's a collection of small things, each meticoulsouy documented and you can pick and choose.

If you still think there is only one Systemd, maybe learn about the tool instead of just talking others after their mouth.

dosisking•38 minutes ago
Well, in my experience, systemd has much worse documentation, is very inconsistent (or you could say it is constistantly brain-dead), and extremely unreliable and unpredictable, since it often hangs when shutting down and rebooting.
bombcar•31 minutes ago
systemd is like the registry. If you drink the koolaid and fully admit and adopt the decisions made, you’ll do ok, perhaps even good.

If you have 20+ years of experience, you’ll will NEVER get it to work the way you expect, might as well install Gentoo.

shevy-java•about 1 hour ago
So, I disagree about your statement here, but let's for a moment assume it were correct - so let's not evaluate THAT particular statement, thus.

You most likely refer to sysinit or something like that, right? Because to what else do you compare it to? Shell scripts?

Shell scripts in general are crap. I don't understand why linux systems use them. When I transitioned to linux a long time ago, I wrote - and still write - pretty much all logic in ruby and .yml files. Literally my whole system is described via .yml files, ruby then just auto-expands all of this into what is meaningful. I also compile from source and manage the system via ruby as-is, so I don't even need systemd, nor shell scripts. But this is just one comment here and if you refer to shell scripts then I agree with you - shell scripts have always been horrible. I fail to see why we should like systemd merely because shell scripts are so awful. That makes no sense. I neither use systemd nor shell scripts (ok ok I bail ... I am currently using manjaro which uses systemd; I disabled most of the services, but the primary reason I was assimilated into systemd is mostly because the non-systemd linux distributions, kind of gave up for the most part or come with their own set of problems - slackware, void and so forth. And yeah, I was using and testing them for ages too, slackware I used for many, many years. It is still a great distribution but it is not really active anymore. No new .iso releases in years, sorry, that is dead. Even if Patrick still updates packages.)

The other part is ... IF you referred to an alternative init system, then THAT comparison is flawed too, because sysvinit is mostly just an init system. Systemd is some giant thing that does 100000 things. So the comparison is, and ALWAYS has been, unfair. Not the same things are compared here.

eptcyka•about 1 hour ago
Systemd is not 1 giant thing that does 100000 things - it is a collection or 10000 services doing 10000 things, integrating amongst themselves where practical. You need not use networkd, logind, resolved or any other one piece of the system you dislike.
mike_hock•about 1 hour ago
It's one of those systemd features that are annoying and in the way when you're trying to accomplish a specific task but deal well with shitware. To be fair to systemd, these features can't usually be implemented without writing new rules for what you have to do to accomplish the legitimate tasks.
Someone•about 1 hour ago
> This is why i dislike systemd. Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

Even if the change is a genuine improvement?

dosisking•42 minutes ago
How can the change be a genuine improvement, if it does something unexpected that needs to be figured out?
ChocolateGod•about 2 hours ago
The fault lies in the distribution for it's default configuration, not systemd.

The article even mentions that distros ship with it turned off

qweqwe14•about 2 hours ago
"The way you expect" is probably inconsistent and, upon closer inspection, completely broken.

There is a reason why systemd became the default and other niche init systems have faded into obscurity.

Sure, it may be more complex than your pile of shell scripts, but that's because it does the same things better, and has a lot more functionality that you will need at some point, and good luck replicating that by hacking shell scripts.

dosisking•43 minutes ago
> There is a reason why systemd became the default and other niche init systems have faded into obscurity.

Yes, it is part of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy

qweqwe14•17 minutes ago
No, it is part of the "I just want stuff to work" strategy
nurettin•about 1 hour ago
> Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

You must love SELinux

dietr1ch•about 2 hours ago
> Things not working the way I expect means I have to do more work to figure something out.

Sound like you don't like computers to begin with

dosisking•about 1 hour ago
He probably just doesn't like having to use poorly written software
BigTTYGothGF•31 minutes ago
That's pretty much all software.
benj111•about 2 hours ago
I'm presumably missing something here. Why does tmux et al not work? Remotely? Ie you're logged in locally and remotely to the same machine, log out locally which kills everything running remotely, but then why would you log in twice like that?

And that being the case can systemd not just only close everything when your logins reach 0?

tux3•about 2 hours ago
You can detach from screen/tmux, leave it running in the background, and log back in later to the same screen/tmux like you left it.

Except systemd can kill it when you log out, so you come back to nothing.

benj111•about 1 hour ago
Ah ok. Seems like the log out metaphor is kind of broken then?

It seems to me if you want persistence between logouts, the processes should belong to a different group/user.

(I'm spitballing hypotheticalshere, not saying anyone/thing in particular is wrong)

dietr1ch•about 1 hour ago
Think about user services in a multi-user setup

Do you want user-level services, or a multi-tenant system-level service? - Who can tweak the service configuration? - How do you ensure there's no data leaks between users? - What about misbehaviour? Quotas, crashes

I think lingering is great here

shevy-java•about 1 hour ago
Systemd is simply too complex.
dietr1ch•about 1 hour ago
But how much of it is inherent complexity?
tremon•about 1 hour ago
Only the pid 1 sigchild handling. Everything else is design choices.
dosisking•41 minutes ago
About 0.1% is inherent complexity
saturn_vk•about 1 hour ago
Which part? Just saying systemd is like saying a distribution is too complex
agumonkey•about 1 hour ago
I may be wrong but he was probably hinting at systemd being a constellation of too many parts.
realusername•about 1 hour ago
As a user I can say that journald was a mistake, if you try to reinvent a database, you will reinvent it poorly and journald wasn't an exception.
kmbfjr•about 1 hour ago
I never had a problem with systemd init despite its quirky habits like just giving up if a mount is bad in fstab, and I rather like systemd-networkd over the other four or five ways of managing the network. Systemd-timesyncd isn’t bad either.

But this, systemd-logind worrying about stuck processes in userspace is exactly the kind of scope creep that ends up justifying a lot of the hand wringing a decade ago. This thing bit me when it came out in a couple different ways and I am unapologetic in my dislike for it. So much so that it has caused me to drift away from Linux where I can. Even though it is a simple fix, I’ve become fatigued with userspace chaos.

Time to re-evaluate what the bazaar has become. Systemd is a common complaint, but it isn’t the only contributor to the fatigue.