On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 08:37:57PM -0400, Steve Litt via talk wrote:
*For your use case*, not for some mythical other user, what does systemd give you, besides compatibility with software deliberately doctored to use only systemd, than S6 or Runit? What can S6 or Runit not do, that's actually of value to you?
S6 I had never even heard of. What system uses that and since when?
The preceding statement encompasses a whole lot of init systems. Runit, s6, busybox init, Perp, OpenRC, Epoch, Upstart and sysvinit. Are you saying you've tried every one of them and found each wanting?
Yes I have tried some of those and absolutely they all sucked. Process monitoring and restarting is absolutely a desirable thing to have and most of them don't do that or at least didn't do it well at the time I tried. Most use shell scripts for things and that's just a crappy system to still use. And in the case of software that actually is updated with explicit systemd support you get service monitoring of whether the service is actually ready to work not just whether the process is running. Sometimes it matters that the database is ready to serve not just that it is starting up before you start something else that uses it. I have not seen anything in the other init replacements that does that. It would have to have enough interest and support for software to add support for it of course. systemd has gotten to that level of interest by enough people for that to happen.
Network Manager's only legitimate benefit, besides being designed for the windows user refusing to learn Linux, is that you can manage your network without root. But other Linux software can give that benefit too.
It is slightly useful at handling wifi connections.
I call Pulseaudio the land of a thousand mutes.
Yeah in the past I found sometimes killing pulseaudio made sound work. Sometimes running pulseaudio made sound work. Why?
Wait a minute. Don't all the GNU utilities and software run on all the BSDs too? All the computer languages work on all BSDs, as does the marvelous ksh shellscripting interpreter. So most of the BSD annoyances you allude to in the preceding paragraph are one tiny shellscript away from solution.
They don't come with the GNU utilities by default. I have better things to do than argue with bad defaults. As for ksh, sure handy for fast scripts if you use a lot of those. Lack of tab completetion makes it totally useless for an interactive shell. I also didn't find any of the BSD's package management particularly nice to deal with. When you are used to apt, it is hard to put up with most other systems anymore. -- Len Sorensen