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Linux Mint Will Continue To Provide Both Systemd and Upstart
jones_supa writes: After Debian adopted systemd, many other Linux distributions based on that operating system made the switch as well. Ubuntu has already rolled out systemd in 15.04, but Linux Mint is providing dual options for users. The Ubuntu transition was surprisingly painless, and no one really put up a fight, but the Linux Mint team chose the middle ground. The Mint developers consider that the project needs to still wait for systemd to become more stable and mature, before it will be the default and only option.
it's in trying to resolve problems later on, when you'll find that systemd helps you obscure the source of the trouble instead of resolve it.
Linux is merely the kernel used by systemd. The correct name of the operating system is systemd/GNU/Linux.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
One more reason to use Mint.
That's the best they could do out of this situation.
I've been learning more about systemd lately, and I'm liking what I'm seeing. It's cohesive, yet it's completely modular. It's modern. Its binary log files make debugging easier. It's getting more and more critical functionality every day, and this makes my Linux system easier to use each time I update it.
The deeper I dig into systemd, and the more I use it, the more I question why we even need the GNU utilities and the Linux kernel.
I hope to see the most useful parts of the GNU toolchain and the most useful parts of the Linux kernel folded into systemd eventually. This way I don't have to install a Linux distro. I can just install systemd itself, and it will give me everything I need.
If my computer boots directly to systemd, and systemd provides the command line tools and the UI, then my boot time will be shaved down to almost nothing, and I'll get to use some really nice and modular command line tools. I won't have to try to remember awkward shell, sed, grep, and awk commands and their flags, because if systemd provided alternatives, I know they would be easier to use.
I've found that systemd is all about empowering me, as a user. It's about letting me get more done with less effort. GNU and Linux aren't always about that. They're about doing things for philosophical reasons, or for scratching an itch of their developers. Systemd is all about getting work done, which is why I've found it to be so useful. If it can do the things that the GNU toolchain and the Linux kernel are doing, but it can do them better, then I'd prefer just to use systemd directly.
To be fair, Linux has always been multiple components that you can chose which one suits you best - whether its vi or emacs, gnome or kde, sendmail or postfix, apache or nginx, etc
This is a good thing, where you can swap out component A for B for any reason, and keeps the project competing with each other to get better and better.
If only you could swap out Systemd so easily, things would be great.
Actually, it seems quite the opposite. We have the systemd crowd claiming that it's simpler even when there is a whole new level of complexity in systemd they don't even know about (hint, look for the systemd craziness in /lib). Like the climate change deniers, they believe that since they haven't personally seen a problem in their simple and vanilla system that there isn't a problem at all.
systemd is an abomination.
Linux's benefit for a long time now has been the ability to swap functionality out you don't like for other functionality that you do. I don't know who in their right mind thought it was okay to move critical system infrastructure systems (init, time, logging, etc) into the hands of an untested piece of software which clearly has very deep issues, written mostly by a developer who has a track record of making extraordinarily poor choices in software development and writing poor code.
What's stunning to me is that smart people in leadership positions in a variety of distributions have decided to support such an asinine system. What's even more stunning is that Lennart didn't stop them, realizing his code was not appropriate in production environments and doing the responsible thing, which is to say "We're far from ready". systemd's position as PID 1 on Linux systems creates an enormous SPOF given the complexity of the code. The only sane position systemd developers can take is "we're not ready, please don't use this even as a test in your released distributions".
For all practical purposes, the rapid and unseemly adoption of systemd means that many enterprises running distributions that now rely upon systemd have to make the decision to not trust their distribution any more if they consider their systems mission critical. This is going to make people move to FreeBSD, Oracle, Windows, non-systemd distributions, microservice/microkernels, etc in rapid fashion. It is going to literally kill Linux for the people who have not yet figured out how to deal with the loss of machines (the majority of the enterprise world). And that may be a good thing, in the sense that Linux has in many ways become indistinguishable and directionless in the sea of operating system options. It tries to be far too many things to far too many people.
Lennart likes to whine about how much the community hates him and how much people take it out on him personally. Reality is that outside of a few people who take it much too far, the reason people don't like Lennart is because he makes poor decisions with poor forethought and his advocacy and arrogance for his own approach have a seriously negative effect on a great many people, enterprises, and efforts. He likes to think he is a genius and we simply don't understand his vision, but for a great many people, his vision is the antithesis of what we like about Linux and Unix. Systemd developers don't understand the arguments of simplicity, composability, and small programs that do one thing well.
The truth is the fault doesn't rely totally upon Lennart and his team: Some of the blame can also be assigned to Linus for poor stewardship, but Linus has a set of complex motives and organizations that influence him. Linus should have killed this stuff much earlier.
I think in a few years, we'll realize what a mistake we made in giving Mr. Poettering any chance of credibility in operating system software development.
I hope it comes sooner rather than later.
because some software expects it and doesn't run without it.
shit software, but software anyways.
that's whats bad about it, really. it's just not a startup replacement but one that aims to turn developers into developing software that can't work without it,, without trouble.
why would startup utility provide user authentication? to conquer everything of course.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's a fact that the fix for corrupt logs, which systemd will often corrupt if you power-cycle your system, is to delete them and throw them away. https://lwn.net/Articles/621453/ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-July/185702.html It's a fact that systemd will only sometimes recover any part of its bullshit binary logs, and only any part after any error. So if journald truncates a file because it shits itself, which it has been known to do, then you lose the whole log.
Moderators, you might want to familiarize yourself with the festering pile of shit which is Lennart Poettering, as well as the pile of crap which is systemd, before you moderate any systemd discussions. Because you clearly have no idea what you're doing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
SysD's binary logs have another, serious flaw: they are not designed to be sent over a network. This has been an intrinsic part of syslog for a looong time.
There are a few tools to send journald logs remotely, but they rely on tailing the binary log, then reformatting it and transmitting it over HTTPS to another tool on the destination system.
I found a feature request for journald/sysd/whatever to enable network logging, and the solution they are adding is to... tail the binary logs with basically the same tools.
Putting the disk in the middle and depending on file tailing is such a bad solution. Many things can cause this to fail; it's a total kludge.
I discovered this when investigating how to send journald logs to Splunk. The solution there is to... tail the binary logs with journald to a text file and have Splunk monitor the text file.
Now, this is not a fatal flaw. Journald could (I assume) be enhanced to natively send logs over a network. But, this shows that systemd is not enterprise-grade or production-grade, and was not designed with that kind of reliability in mind.