systemdeez nuts

Man, wait until these people hear about the filesystem and kernel.

It's also "infectious" software. The way systemd positions itself on the system, it can make it more difficult for software to be written in an agnostic way. This isn't all software, and is often more of a complaint by lower level software, like desktop environments.
https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/ This isn't a terrible summary of some of the aspects of it.

Another aspect is that when it was first developed, the lead on the project was exceptionally hostile to anyone who didn't immediately agree that systemd definitely should take over most of the system, often criticizing people who pointed out bugs or questionable design decisions as being afraid of change or relics of the past.
It's more of a social reason, but if people feel like the developer of a tool they're forced to use doesn't even respect their concerns, they're going to start rejecting the tool.

Indeed, the Unix philosophy was do one thing and do it well. ls just list directory’s and files it’s not a network manager too. Systemd crams a lot of extra shit into an init.d/rc.

I still prefer the old system-v/openRC setup or BSD’s setup. It’s simple does 1 job and does it well. But I can work with systemd just fine in creating scripts these days and it does have some nice features like user startup scripts baked into it and podman integrates very nicely with it.

It isn't though, systemd is broken into smaller parts.

For me it’s 3 things

• Do one thing and do it well
• Everything is a file in Linux
• human readable logs

Systemd breaks all three of though by being monolithic and binary. It actually makes you have to jump through more hoops to do things in certain cases. I understand it’s a mindset shift but it really starts making it feel more like Windows with how it works and the registry and event log.

Your comment summarizes my entire programming career.

These steps:

1. Be taught that there's a specific way to do something because the other ways have major issues

2. Find something that goes against that specific way and hate it

3. After a lot of familiarity, end up understanding it

4. Have a mix emotion of both loving it because it functions so well and hating it because it doesn't align with the rules you've set up

Good that you've enjoyed it. But a fundamentally wrong thing about systemd is that it is actively harming the best thing about Linux – freedom. Some programs won't work on a non-systemd distro because how tightly coupled and vendor non-agnostic anything that becomes dependent on might become at times. Of course it's not as bad as glib(loat)c, but still if something can be done without any degradation of functionality via standard POSIX facilities, WHY either incur additional maintenance overhead for non-systemd implementations or punish people for their computing choices if there's no one to maintain it?

Systemd came out over 10 years ago

Damn systemd is LGPL and not GPL? Another reason to hate lol

There is also the argument that it's more complicated under the hood and harder to troubleshoot, particularly because of it's inherent parallelism and dependency-tree design, whereas initv was inherently serial. It was much more straightforward to pick the order in which services started and shut down on an initv system.

For example, say I write a service and I want it to always be the first service stopped during a shutdown, and I want all other services to wait for it to stop before shutting down. That was trivial to do on an initv system, it's basically impossible on systemd.

For those wondering, yes I did run into this situation. My solution was clobbering the shutdown, poweroff, and restart binaries with scripts earlier in path search that stop my service, verify that they're stopped, and then hook back to systemd to do the power event.

Debian, Arch, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Manjaro all have docs and wiki on their primary websites. Slackware has docs, Gentoo has a wiki. Anything that's not on a distro's site needs to be carefully considered before tampering. Almost all of those distros have a warning in their installation instructions to only listen to the information in their docs and wiki, and to a lesser extent their forums. Hell, even nosystemd.org tells you what systemd is, what it's for, what replacements there are, and the proper way to get rid of it in bold text under the header "How do I get rid of systemd?"

Listening to hackneyed advice from unvetted sources just because they have strong opinions is a problem that any and every computer will face. That's not a problem with linux anymore than the hoardes of trolls on random social media sites telling you to "delete System32" is a problem with Windows.

I want Linux to be customizable AND safe. But safe in the way that someone takes the time to learn how what they plan to do will effect their system, not safe in the sense of "impossible to bork"

As for elitism: if it's "elitist" to indirectly poke fun of someone who deleted a core system component without understanding what it does without a backup, then so be it. It feels more like that word is levied by people whose ego is too big to take respobsibility for the mistakes they made, and instead blame others for laughing when it bites them in the ass.

Idk where these swaths of elitists that refuse to help are. OOP went to stackexchange and likely got a helpful answer complete with explanations, as that is the community standard. Over on [email protected] , I see people offering help with problems all the time without shitting on them. If I go to the aforementioned OS forums, or really any software-specific forums, I see people helping or pointing people to where they can get help.

And I'm not denying that assholes who say shit like "did you even bother googling?" exist. They're nasty people with no patience, but they're by no means the community standard unless they're the only ones you pay attention to...

Or unless you see a screenshot of a question from a different website posted in a meme-sharing forum and expect the comments to offer advice, instead of laughing at the person who shot themselves in the foot and went to a hospital instead of seeking help at the DNC HQ

The cultural elitism comes from years of tinkering with their system since all the information they can find is fragmented and spread around, highly opinionated,’poorly digestible, out of date, and often dangerous.

I feel this in my soul, except about Windows. I've got a handful of machines at work that refuse to update to Windows 10 22H2. They give an error code during the compatibility check. Googling that error code returns dozens of forum posts with hundreds of users and "Microsoft support agents" chiming in. They give the same list of suggestions—that don't work—to fix it. Nobody can say what the error code means, or what the compatibility check checks. The official Microsoft fix is to reinstall.

I don't want to reinstall. The suite of software these computers run would take several hours to reinstall.

This is typical of my experience with Windows. (I'm a Unix/Linux guy.) I look up how to do something in Windows, and with the official Microsoft documentation, one of three things inevitably happens:

1. I follow the steps and click the things, and it still doesn't work.
2. I can't follow the steps because one of the things to click is greyed out for some reason.
3. I can't follow the steps because the documentation refers to an older edition, and Microsoft has removed one of the things to click.

One time, when trying to get Excel to run a mail merge, I ran into all three problems in three attempts.

The same happens with 3rd party sites. They never say the edition of Windows to which their guide refers, and the feature is deprecated or gone. (Most recently it was about getting a Windows 10 start menu behavior back on 11.)

Oh, and since Windows is mainstream, a lot of the information is in the form of AI vomit, and covered in ads and dark patterns.

To be fair, Windows and Macos support is like this too. Its random forum suggestions from even less technical people.

The distros official resources are comprehensive and don't have the issue of being outdated and fragmented.

that they found the wrong information because they have literally no idea what's good or bad, instead of helping, they get shit on.

I don't think anyone's seriously shitting on nooby mistakes, because everyone has done something stupid like that and learned a lesson from it. It's kind of a "cute noob" moment

Except the principles behind linux aren't "being able to customize however you want", that's the principle behind certain distros like Arch. Linux is about being free and open-source, so nobody is beholden to a single entity making sweeping changes that are bad for the community but good for their bottom line.

This isn't a Linux problem this is a society problem people just want to one up everyone In anyway they can and sometimes I dont think we do it consciencely

Can confirm I am a Linux lurker who would love to learn all this cool shit but right now I don't have the time/mental fortitude to wade through all the bullshit and experiment. I already do that enough with power platform at work and I know that I know nothing. It's exhilarating and tiresome. It would be great if we could have some "training wheels" type of community on here to help new users out.

Cool thing is, GPT fixes all the problems with elitist gatekeeping assholes, whether on stack exchange or something random Linux forum. It truly democratizes information.

He is less technically inclined

He read a prompt asking if he wanted to remove his system and said yes

Then complained about it

Nah, more like deleting explorer.exe.

There's isn't really a Windows equivalent for this, as Windows doesn't give you control on this level.

It'd be as if you could delete services.msc but also the runner behind it.

I don’t think you’ll get a cli if you delete system32.

But system32 contains the NT kernel as well, so that's worse. Uninstalling your init system on a Linux distro still leaves you with single user mode. You could probably reinstall an init system from there.

Is it system32 or SySWow64 these days?

On Debian you can actually change init systems. Don't know how hard it is and you are probably meant to install a new one after removing systemd, but it is possible at least.

systemd is more like, uhh, ignition that takes care of way too many things beyond starting the engine

he fuckin got me there

Windows hss supported slashes in both directions for a very long time. I almost exclusively use forward slashes to reduce mental load when switching between OSes.

Snapper works on all distros with BTRFS

It's no tits

Refuse computers, go back to Abacus

Arch?

Yeah i remember debian installs sysvinit if you apt remove systemd and installs systemd if you apt remove sysvinit

I don't want to be in control of starting up all the services during boot.
I want the init system to do that.

I use BTRFS, and it randomly decided to corrupt like half of the system packages on my system after an update, but all I had to do to fix it was boot into a live environment and run a command to reinstall everything on my system. :P

No probably about it

what? Will it warn me for removing the french language pack? That's what I call bloat!!

Actually that's RMS getting older. Afaik only GNU rm protects the root.

That wasn't the command I wrote though

rm is part of GNU or busybox though.

They said ~/

I don't think there's any protection for the current user's home directory

Only at work when logged in to the admin account.

Just give me a magnet, a needle and an hd platter

Screens are bloat. Give me a real tty