To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

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HessenZone
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#11 Post by HessenZone »

dreamer wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 10:44 amOn the other hand if you are a System Administrator maybe systemd is a gift from the gods. Many experienced Linux users do like systemd. Just don't expect a systemd based distro to work "out of the box".
My understanding is that Debian runs by default with systemd. I've never had any problems running Debian out of the box. We use Debian on our Server too and never have to fix or patch anything related to systemd, at least not that I'm aware of. I'm not a certified SysAdmin, but we do have one who does any server related work that I can't do on my own. Hah, until I read that post about someone switching their default MX boot to a systemd boot instead, I never even knew that systemd existed. :duh:
It's like they say, you learn something new every day.
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timkb4cq
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#12 Post by timkb4cq »

Sysadmins swear by systemd until it fails. Then they swear at it.
It allows some simple process control that's harder to do without it, but it's much harder to troubleshoot when the SHTF.
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dreamer
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#13 Post by dreamer »

I don't know much about Debian. The quality of Ubuntu (and every Ubuntu-based distro) skydived after the introduction of systemd. Coincidence? I don't know. Dedoimedo will tell you that the last good Ubuntu release was 14.04 (Upstart-based) and I fully agree. He also gave some praise to Kubuntu 17.04 (systemd-based), but that wasn't a LTS release so not very important. Of course he gave a lot of praise to MX 17, which was expected (maybe even distro of the year?).

If Debian has a solid implementation of systemd, that's great. Someone (a very knowledgeable guy) tried to tell me that systemd is better than other inits, I just didn't know how to use it. He was right about that, but am I as a user supposed to dive into the inner workings of systemd? It's clearly the server mentality vs desktop user mentality.

https://www.dedoimedo.com/

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dolphin_oracle
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#14 Post by dolphin_oracle »

dreamer wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 12:18 pm
If Debian has a solid implementation of systemd, that's great. Someone (a very knowledgeable guy) tried to tell me that systemd is better than other inits, I just didn't know how to use it. He was right about that, but am I as a user supposed to dive into the inner workings of systemd? It's clearly the server mentality vs desktop user mentality.
It really shouldn't matter to a desktop user, with the caveat that timkb4q added about scripts that start services sometimes being problematic. A big example right now is "plex" which doesn't package a sysvinit script. We hacked one on if plex is installed by MX-packageinstaller, but it ain't exactly pretty.


I personally don't care what the init system is, but the antiX live system (which gives MX the live-USB goodness) utilizes and expects sysVinit to be in use.
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KBD
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#15 Post by KBD »

I haven't seen those quick boot times promised by systemd, instead it has made boot times across some of my OS's boot slower. systemd-analyze blame will show slow boot issues. systemd is a cancer, it infects the entire OS and I have serious doubts anyone will be able to avoid it on any Linux distro in another two years, maybe less. Already I've seen it cause me trouble on MX.
When I first heard about systemd I really didn't have any strong feelings about it. Now I wish Linux had avoided it entirely. But Redhat and Fedora, whose actions are mimicked by Debian for reasons that elude me, have stuck us with systemd and it is becoming critical software that it will soon take herculean efforts to avoid.

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dreamer
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#16 Post by dreamer »

My problem with systemd started with malfunctioning systems. The shut down time-out was described as a "feature" by the systemd expert, but in my case it was an unwanted feature. The network connection in Ubuntu became very unreliable after systemd, but it would be unfair to blame systemd for everything without proof.

HessenZone has mentioned Debian as a distro which doesn't require user invention to have reasonably working systemd. Are there any other distros like that? What I really want to know is if someone has had a good systemd experience out of the box? (booting to fully working desktops, no time-outs, no unwanted restarts etc.)

I booted with Upstart since 2008 and I hardly knew what an init system was, because it just worked, just like SysV works in MX. Then came systemd and init became "rocket science".

systemd = more than one million lines of code
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?px=sy ... =news_item

sysvinit = ten thousand lines of code (max)

I won't complain if MX switches to systemd because if anyone can make systemd work out of the box it's probably the antiX/MX team. Still sad if complexity wins over simplicity because then even fewer people will be able to understand and troubleshoot.

turtlebay777
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#17 Post by turtlebay777 »

I use a website called skylinewebcams.com in conjunction with a screen recorder called Vokoscreen screencast to record wild animal sightings. If I start any of my Dell laptops with systemd everything works well, but if I start the same PCs with sysvinit, the Vokoscreen crashes and it crashes the whole system.
Why, I have no clue.

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HessenZone
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#18 Post by HessenZone »

dreamer wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:33 pm My problem with systemd started with malfunctioning systems. The shut down time-out was described as a "feature" by the systemd expert, but in my case it was an unwanted feature. The network connection in Ubuntu became very unreliable after systemd, but it would be unfair to blame systemd for everything without proof.

HessenZone has mentioned Debian as a distro which doesn't require user invention to have reasonably working systemd. Are there any other distros like that? What I really want to know is if someone has had a good systemd experience out of the box? (booting to fully working desktops, no time-outs, no unwanted restarts etc.)
I don't think it's as simple as just pointing to any particular distro. We've been using Linux full time for everything, professionally too, for the past 10 years. Of that time, we've been using distros such as Debian, Mint, and others, but always with the XFCE desktop since we like that one the best. During the past 4 years or so we've used primarily Linux Mint on our machines. We're not gamers either. So between the type of desktop and the lack of gaming, perhaps that has a lot to do with the long-term performance of any distro with systemd as well? I can't speak for other people, but ever since Mint 16 I can honestly say that we've experienced hardly any negative issues that couldn't be tracked back directly to our own behavior on a computer.

Two browsers with dozens of tabs open, heavy duty Office applications including databases, Web authoring with Komodo, Server usage, Watching hundreds of videos and playing thousands upon thousands of songs, with never a problem that could be blamed on the system. As a matter of fact, I had mentioned this elsewhere, our Livingroom machine has a bad reset function which forces us to do a hard reset on it every day, been doing that for months, and that Mint 18.3 setup runs just as well as on the first day. All of our machines are hard-wired and home-networked together too, with never a problem.

As stated before, I don't know anything about systemd and have to judge the perfomance of my OS based on my experiences with it. On very very rare occasions we've seen some minor bugginess with Mint over the years, but nothing serious that couldn't be easily & quickly corrected. That's why I call it trouble-free, since nothing is actually perfect. But with MX Linux 17 we've indeed experienced enough issues that my wife isn't ready to make that switch yet. We've experienced WiFi connectivity issues which inexplicably fixed themselves during the course of 3 to 5 days while working on machines that belong to other people. We've experienced printer issues that couldn't be corrected - but in all fairness that seems to be a linux wide problem. And most recently I've experiened a mount problem with MX 17 that I simply cannnot fix, an internal drive with an NTFS partition that simply can not be made to auto-mount. But that's another issue for aother day in another part of this forum.

I have believed for quite some years now, that 99.9% of all computer issues, regardless if on Windows or on Linux machines, have to do with either gaming, excessive use beyond that which other hardware was designed to handle, or software incompatibility which was created by the installer i.e. the user of a particular machine. So far, I can't find any reason to use or not to use systemd, since I don't personally see any more stability with MX Linux than I've seen with Mint or with Debian. I'm not a certified SysAdmin though and I'm not a code guru either. I'm thrilled with MX Linux because of the speed, compatibility with 10 year old computers, the snapshot feature, and some other things. I plan on being an MX Linux user as long as it exists.
Wow, some pretty cool discussing going on here. :happy:
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dreamer
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#19 Post by dreamer »

Thank you for your post. It made me feel more positive about the future of Linux. If Linux Mint can get systemd right it means that it is possible (if the stars align ;) ). Still why bring the monolithic design issues from Windows to Linux? Didn’t great engineers figure out how to build a flexible and robust system back in the 70s?

From Wikipedia:
“Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the "Unix philosophy". This concept entails that the operating system provides a set of simple tools that each performs a limited, well-defined function,[6] with a unified filesystem as the main means of communication,[3] and a shell scripting and command language to combine the tools to perform complex workflows.”

I knew that Linux Mint added some polish to the Ubuntu base and just like MX devs they are good at making things that work. So I believe you when you say you have a trouble-free experience with systemd in Linux Mint. Still I believe that for distros that don’t really care anymore (Ubuntu) or distros that lack the Linux Mint resources, making systemd work out of the box can be difficult. These distros refer to “upstream”, when talking about systemd problems. That is actually correct, because those systemd problems I have described are not distro-specific, but in most cases “features” of Systemd. Linux Mint has the resources to work around the problems of Systemd, most distros don’t. Linux Mint introduced start-up delays in Cinnamon Control Center, but the measures probably went further than that to make sure Linux Mint boots to a functional desktop.

The problem with Mint is that they not only add polish but also restrictions. Clem pulled their snapshot tool (think it was called Mint Constructor or something like that) and made sure Systemback wouldn’t work with Mint (workarounds did exist). The Linux Mint brand was more important than users’ ability to create installable ISOs. He claimed the ISO creation functionality was abused by people creating Linux Mint distro clones.

I’m glad your experience with Linux Mint has been really positive. I have read that people experience the 90 sec time-out even on Mint and that Mint isn’t immune to the Ubuntu problem best described as “a tiny tiny update that breaks the system”. For example a minor security update to the kernel that breaks some important part of the system. In the past Linux Mint didn’t include kernel updates by default. Now I see Linux Mint is including those kernel updates in Linux Mint 19.

I’m still sceptical about systemd, but reading that it is possible to have a fully working system with systemd made feel better. I still see systemd as a sysadmin tool that has been forced on desktop users. The “systemd expert” stated that if he can choose init himself his preferred init is runit. I think he defended systemd mostly because he was tired of people complaining about it.

“One of the runit project's principles is to keep the code size small. As of version 1.0.0 of runit, the runit.c source contains 330 lines of code; the runsvdir.c source is 274 lines of code, the runsv.c source 509. This minimizes the possibility of bugs introduced by programmer's fault, and makes it more easy for security related people to proofread the source code.”

https://www.dragora.org/repo.fsl/doc/tr ... tsystem.md

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stsoh
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Re: To systemd or not systemd - Ever wonder about it?

#20 Post by stsoh »

let's make it simple, try to create zram and zswap on systemd. :eek:

https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/
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