Systemd is incredibly versatile and most people, including myself, are unaware of its full potential. Despite its usefulness, it is often overlooked due to controversy and the current state of things when it comes to software development. Begin today your journey thought Systemd's capabilities and discover how to efficiently manage systems with fewer processes than traditionally used.

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. :)

    • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
      175·
      11 months ago

      Same reason as for all those years these old people are holding a grudge for…

      It is not Unix philosophy (nothing is these days), it does not solve any problem they ever had (it does), it is no improvement over what we had before (it is) and even makes some broken and moronic things harder (it does), it is insecure (it improves overall system security), and it is one monolithic blob (it is not). Before systemd nothing depended on the init system (true, but then it did nothing useful that made having such a dependency worthwhile), and before systemd we were all free to use other init systems and distributions did not pick one for their users (they always did, offering additional inits only as unsupported iption just likenthey do now).

      That’s the typical list you get.

      Oh, and it was shoved down all our throats by the mighty Lennart himself, backed by several multi billion dollar companies that brided thousands of distribution developers to destroy Linux (it was not).

      Funnily enough it is pretty much the same BS we had when that monster of complexity called sysv init was introduced into distributions, replacing a simple script with a forest of symlinks. Of course the community was much smaller then and so we had a loser number of idiots to shout at everybody else.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
        51·
        11 months ago

        It seems that, in many people’s view, it’s better to have janky scripts starting systems, having to delegate logging management and service monitorization to the services themselves or cumbersome tools poorly used by most distros such as logrotate? Systemd offers a good thing, easy configuration and IT DOES fix a LOT of issues. People who never tried it won’t see how better it is, just try it… like I did 10 years ago.

        One of the moments where we see the true power of systemd is when we use it for containers and suddenly realize that the tools used to manage the system such as systemctl and journalctl can be used to inspect and affect a container without even having to enter it. Another equally interesting moment in the systemd journey is when you’ve an ARM system with 512MB of RAM or even less and you figure out that it will save you precious resources for other things.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
        92·
        11 months ago

        The fact the original website is no longer available tells us a LOT about it. Maybe the server running it crashed because it didn’t have proper service monitoring… or all the init jankiness was wasting so much resources the guy paying for the server run out of money :D

        Now in all seriousness: I don’t disagree with most points however, systemd also provides a TON of functionally that was never this easy and stable. Also if you consider the grand scheme of things Docker and whatnot are a bigger virus than systemd is or will ever be and the irony is that systemd does run containers with less overhead :).