this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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After a few conversations with people on Lemmy and other places it became clear to me that most aren't aware of what it can do and how much more robust it is compared to the usual "jankiness" we're used to.

In this article I highlight less known features and give out a few practice examples on how to leverage Systemd to remove tons of redundant packages and processes.

And yes, Systemd does containers. :)

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[–] marmarama 59 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Do we have to bring this up again? It's just boring.

systemd is here and it isn't going anywhere soon. It's an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.

Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.

Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?

[–] TCB13 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.

While I agree with the rest I don't particularly believe in this. The unit format is well structured and solves many pitfalls of previous approaches, it also supports configuring a myriad of different things from mounts to sockets and the network in a nice way.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I find systemctl to do a much better job than any alternative that comes stock with distros. I’m looking at you service

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Thanks for summarizing my feelings on systemd in a less inflammatory way than if I had written it myself.

I've found that most distributions have implemented it properly and for the most part it works quite well and stays out of my way, it's only when for some reason you have to dive into the minutiae of a unit file and getting into all the dependencies and stuff that it gets annoying quickly.

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[–] ozymandias117 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One of the big complaints of systemd detractors I read is that it’s “monolithic” and “taking over everything” and this “shouldn’t all be part of init”

You might want to point out that all the features outside of systemd-as-init are optional and can be replaced or ignored if you don’t want them. They also don’t run as PID 1

You do have to use systemd-journald, but you can also just forward it to syslog if you want

[–] TCB13 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

all the features outside of systemd-as-init are optional and can be replaced or ignored if you don’t want them

Yes, but the point of the article was kind of the opposite - simply try all the systemd tools and components and see how much better things can get.

[–] ozymandias117 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, but if you’re trying to convince the groups that hates systemd, a preamble of “these don’t run in PID 1 and are just extra features you might find useful” could help

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (4 children)

systemd brings much functionality. It can't follow unix philosophy because unix is 50 years old. the whole community drama about this systemd VS sysV VS OpenRC VS whatever comes up, is funny. There are distros that are systemd-free if you wish so much to avoid it.

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[–] mrvictory1 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Finally a systemd praise post after so many hateful remarks. I knew systemd could do dns resolving but just learned it could handle the entire network stack and replace NetworkManager. I have a question: How can services such as Apache adapt to both NM and systemd at the same time? NM and systemd have different wait-online services. You can also add systemd-analyze for boot time analysis to the list.

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[–] Quazatron 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very interesting article with lots of links that I'm sure to revisit often. I use Linux daily and was not aware of all the possibilities that systemd has to offer.

Some of the cruft I use nowadays to manage Linux machines can be optimized by simply moving over to the systemd equivalent. Of particular interest to me are: triggers, timers, file monitoring, and ntp.

[–] TCB13 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thank you. NTP and DNS are the easiest to get into. Simply enable the services and move on.

[–] t0m5k1 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I stopped using resolved as it tends to ignore what I tell it to do and still grab DNS from the router which I don't want and can't disable on the proprietary router.

openresolv/Resolveconf was never broken in the first place so I'm not sure what systemd was trying to fix with this.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

systemd-nspawn is basically chroot but better

[–] TCB13 5 points 1 year ago

Way, way better. Nowadays its more "basically" LXC. :P

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