April 30, 2058

GNU? Linux? Ha! How ancient! Everyone uses systemd-coreutils and systemd-kernel. Nobody needs those useless old programs. In fact, systemd is so good that even Microsoft recently released their own systemd distro, and adopted the motto: “We Really Do Love Open Source This Time”. To show their love for open source, they’ve released the source for Snipping Tool under a BSD license.

systemd is super lightweight! My system uses around 600 gigs of RAM, whereas Windows uses upwards of a terabyte! I currently use the systemd-gnome desktop environment. I used to use KDE Plasma 18, but it didn’t integrate well with the rest of my operating system. systemd-braininterface doesn’t work very well with my Nvidia graphics card, so I use systemd-x11 like a hipster.

I’ve had no regrets switching to systemd. I feel bad for those BSD nerds. What a laughing stock, sticking to POSIX. Nobody writes POSIX programs anymore.

I wonder what lies in the future for systemd... I hope they fix systemd-oomd.

This post also lives on https://www.nixmagic.com/systemd if you're interested 🙂

@Condor debian was forked,
long live https://devuan.org maybe even after Microsoft acquires linux.

@M1sf3t great idea

POSIX is just interface standards right? If i were to guess systemd likely uses POSIX for processing, threading, and scheduling.

Can any bigger nerds than me chime in here?

I am missing something... What is so special in a distro without systemd?

@M1sf3t I can't say much about it yet but the practical plans are gradually taking shape.. I've found a name for it, am almost finished constructing the business end of the plans, and will soon start with the designs engineering-wise. That's likely going to take a few months before the company would launch. Come to think of it though, I could definitely use testers at some point. Perhaps a mailing list could work?

@dmonkey not all that much actually, except that the inits are much more.. simply? built. I've tried to use FreeBSD for a while and their init in particular was quite interesting. It takes getting used to and I could never quite get the hang of it, which coupled with other issues like sound and supported display resolutions ended up me discarding it in favor of Arch again.. but it definitely did look interesting. BSD seems great for routers and such. So I might as well try to familiarize myself with it and other inits at some point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can we use this as copypasta?

@jonhyfun I mean I kanged it too (:

I was reading lennart's response to the criticism.
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/...

I don't know much about linux development so I was wondering what are your thoughts on that post.

@jesustricks fairly old post, lots of points to address, ...

2 of them particularly irk me, that systemd is modular and that HA setups benefit from its parallelization to reduce downtime. Both have some elements of truth but are practically bullshit. Allow me to elaborate.

The source code is modular and well-written. There's lots of code that does unit testing and so forth. And overall the tree is surprisingly small. But modularity would only apply if you compile it yourself, which not many sysadmins do. Gentoo is the only distro that I'm aware of that even allows such thing from within the package manager, and it is not a common server distribution. Anywhere else, binaries are used. Those are not modular just like distribution kernels aren't really modular either (and why I usually compile my own).

The HA point only applies when downtime actually matters, which in HA setups surprisingly.. it doesn't. When you've got n+1 or more servers running for a purpose, one of them can go down at any time, for as long as it wants until another one bites the dust (for which you'd need n+2 redundancy). HA setups are never a single server so the time it takes for something to reboot doesn't matter at all. It's nice to have a server that boots up quickly, but it doesn't matter much. It only does when you run a single server in which case HA is irrelevant.

I've been discovering OpenRC in Gentoo as of recently and it does everything I want an init to do and more. Systemd adds some novelties here and there but personally I'll stick with an init that's just an init and doing things like syslog, klog and cron in their own separate daemons. Perhaps it's one of those things where some people desire "just works" systems like Ubuntu, iOS etc whereas others prefer granular choices about what they run. Arch, Gentoo, window managers, ...

@Condor i hate with a burning passion the way systrmd units are configured.

So I would love to migrste but I don't have any metrics of how fast openrc can boot, and I heard it's way slower. is that true?

I ask because I'm on a hd, and I don't see myself losing boot speed at all. I reboot my machine way too often.

@jesustricks off a mechanical drive I don't think that boot time will be affected much, those are already quite slow on random io (do consider getting an SSD).. but it depends on how many services you run during init, though if memory serves me right OpenRC supports parallelization as well. On a very old Compaq nx7010 from 2004 at least I reboot in around 15 seconds off a CF card (an SSD for IDE drives if you will).

As for the inevitable question as for why I still keep that museum piece, it's got an amazing keyboard 😋 so now it's being used as a keyboard and mouse with smarts in it. It controls 3 workstations over the network.