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. :)

  • SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    122·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • w2qw
      52·
      1 year ago

      The dependency system takes a bit to understand but compared to like upstart it was a massive improvement.

        • Ghoelian@feddit.nlEnglish
          131·
          1 year ago

          Or, even worse, A start job is running for ... (10s / no limit)

        • dmar@lemmy.world
          42·
          1 year ago

          I don’t see how exactly that is systemd’s fault.

          You are blaming it for having proper dependency handling?

          • SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            102·
            1 year ago

            I’m blaming it for making it a pain in the ass to debug dependency problems and for having the confusing, non-intuitive, overly verbose and redundant syntax that probably caused the problem in the first place.

            Like, who the hell can memorize all the subtle differences in behavior between After=, Requires=, Wants=, Requisite=, BindsTo=, PartOf=, UpHolds= and then all their “reverse” equivalents?

            • Laser@feddit.de
              1·
              1 year ago

              You’re right that the difference isn’t overly obvious. However, for most services, Wants= is enough. I think some of these (like Requisite=) came from actual users’ demands where they had to solve corner cases in their setup that systemd did not allow with the existing features. I think especially UpheldBy= is a smart addition; it adds restarting to a service only if that services is used as a dependency for the one it upholds.