Good news is that systemd is not incorporating age verification just like they are not incorporating name verification.

Both name and birth date are just userdb fields with no verification at all.

Is there an article on this I can read? I was about to start looking into trying Nix and that’s kinda disappointing to hear

I might be exaggerating based on the little I've seen, particularly this post LINK which has a very misleading title, but the number of packages for AI integration to NixOS and forks for Agentic OS and workflows, the amount of support (real or otherwise) for AI in the NixOS communities, and articles like this one: LINK, would be a hard sell to tell me were all coincidence.

I have a keyboard like that and I used to get laid…

Not everything. Some times you have to write your own .service files.

Then for a special kind of pain, learn how those file contents affect apparmor.

(I’m looking at you, Transmission Gtk Daemon.)

The tragedy of systemd (Benno Rice)

Thanks for the link. Might put me off Nix a bit. I may look into comparing some of the other immutable distros like Fedora’s. Idk I avoided them early on, but I’ve had to spend a lot of time fixing shit lately and was considering a change.

Have you tried CachyOS? It's built on Arch but it's a lot easier to get into, let's you pick a desktop environment such as KDE Plasma or GNOME in the installation, the install media itself is a portable OS.

Definitely good to keep an open mind while you shop around for your next distro.

Recently there was a hacker issue with the AUR repos, but most of the packages you need are likely already on the official CachyOS package search without requiring an AUR package.

I’m actually on CachyOS now. I’ve got a list of stuff I need to fix with it unfortunately. Namely issues with monitors, and some finicky stuff with USB devices that I’ve got to unplug after every wake on sleep, plus a handful of other items I don’t notice as often.

But it does work, so I haven’t been too unhappy with it. It’s just the time to fix things that bugs me sometimes.

Debating reinstalling again since there’s been some major changes like ditching Octopi and Cachy Package manager for Shelly. Plus I’ve kinda wanted something different from KDE and now that they’ve got Noctalia in the default installer it seemed appealing.

Lol I’m not one for doing updates too frequently so I did miss the AUR issue. I saw the news, but hadn’t updated so I was in the clear

NGL I haven't had much experience with the package managers because I've been installing everything with the konsole via pacman -S and flatpak install flathub commands or manually if needed. I'm surprised to hear about the USB devices issue, even my analogue audio interface worked plug and play and I've never had to reseat them.

I can count on one hand the number of times I used Octopi so it’s not a big loss. But I heard good things about Shelly so I was thinking of giving it a whirl.

The USB thing, man, my microphone and my wireless receiver for my controller, both those damn things have to be unplugged on wake every time before they work. Couldn’t find any bios settings related to it as I thought it could be a power setting, but I’ve come up short. Plus (i think it’s) X Window Manager won’t recognize my actual primary monitor as my primary monitor and instead chooses to default to my 90 degree rotated monitor until log in. Never mind what KDE says is primary or the file for XWM says…

There’s some other small gripes, but I’ve just been living with it for the time being.

free software but you can't be free like that

Is that what we're going to do today, Kitty? We're gonna fight?

I appreciate the apology in advance, but it is not necessary. I am happy to have a civilized conversation like we are having, even if we disagree.

To my knowledge, the arguments against systemd boil down to:

1. They recently added an option to ask for age verification, which distros do not have to use, and I believe they walked it back already.
2. It goes against the values of Linux to have a singular project be responsible for many functions instead of doing one small thing well.
3. It is large-ish for what it is, and could be more efficient with resources.

Now I'm not here to tell you to care or not to care, that's your own prerogative. But think about the type of people who WOULD care, given the context? Is it gamers who bought a Steam Deck off the shelf and may not even know what Linux is? Or is it a specific subset of Linux enthusiasts who are a specific subset of PC enthusiasts who are a specific subset of people who use Linux machines? I think we can both agree it is the latter 99.9% of the time.

To your second point, you have more or less invalidated the 3rd possibility of not liking systemd. It simply works better in most cases. Alternatives are not that much worse or anything, that's just what it is right now. COULD it potentially be better if it was the way we imagined it in our head? Maybe, but then just make your own version if you know how to make it better. But to really ANSWER your argument, by "less people will use it", I mostly mean distro devs. It got forked immediately after the slightest hint of age verification. If it becomes an actual problem, you can bet it will swiftly be replaced by most distros, and non-tech people will not even realize it happened. Especially if that subset of Linux enthusiasts who don't like it start jumping ship for others distros that don't have it. Things change allll the time in Linux. Nothing is irreplaceable or unforkable.

It's like that very very old joke...

Geek: "So then I brought the girl home..."
Excited crowd: "and then?"
Geek: "then I pushed the keyboard and sat her on my desk..."
Excited crowd: "woah, you have a PC? What processor do you have? Do you overclock? What cooling do you use?"

The real problem with systemd is figuring out what's is or isn't part of systemd...

I've gotta say, I didn't expect this argument on a Linux enthusiast sub in the Fediverse. A few hours to restore backup files and configuration files is not a luxury lol. I mean, I get really busy sometimes and don't even have a few hours to spare to re-image, but damn. I find time eventually. You probably have a backup system in place already too. If you care enough to complain, you care enough to fix the problem.

I am baffled by the "daunted" comment. I thought about commenting "skill issue", but this just isnt even the case here. You're already past that. You moved off Windows or macOS, you probably tried several distros before landing on one. I can't imagine the venn diagram of people who care about systemd and the people who are afraid to try a new distros are anything but two separate circles. And I can assure you non-systemd distros are not really any different in practice. I think I ran into one niche app that wouldn't work without systemd on antiX. Otherwise, same old same ole.

Honestly this is just a me thing with my brain. I have VERY high PC setup inertia. If my system's running, I’ll keep it that way. And if there’s a problem (like my current Linux being actually fucked), first reflex is to get a panic attack.
Was probably wrong of me to generalize my inertia here especially in the Linux community so I’ll apologize for that.

Hey, just wanted to let you know that I downvoted your comment. Mainly because I think it's funny when people can't come up with compelling arguments and complain about being downvoted instead, but also because I'm part of the conspiracy making sure that people vocally complaining about systemd seem really annoying and wrong.

Dang, everyone is so much nicer in the Fediverse. Now I feel like an asshole for poking fun at you a little bit. My bad. What error are you getting on boot BTW?

He presents well, but many of his arguments beg þe question -- þey assume false premises. I'm not going to dissect þe entire hour-long video, but as an example þe main premise he starts wiþ is þat people who don't like systemd don't like it because it isn't familiar. I doubt þis is true except in his BSD domain. I've been using systemd since before it grew into þe monstrosity it now is, and I'm equally comfortable writing systemd services and timers, and am familiar wiþ þe commands. I've learned to not like it as it's grown and gotten worse, and I'd guess þat a survey of anti-systemd people will show most of þem use systemd enough þat þe presumption of disliking it because it's "different" is wildly wrong.

I also take exception to his discounting þe value of mix-and-match systems. It's funny þat he disparages "contempt" and þen tosses out negative statements like "having to cobble togeþer a bunch of different pieces of software," as if somehow diversity and choice is bad. It's such a strange mentality for someone from þe BSD community.

þe

Yeah, I'm not going to read that shit

at first i read it as greek and was very confused

no

Really completely different? Do they not print first / last lines of text from a file into the terminal?

GUI certainly has its place.

I was annoyed with binary logs until I found cases where compressing logs was literally 10x or more improvement, like if you ran into a bug that just repeatedly spit the same log.

And I know logrotate compresses text logs too but if you're going to compress logs into tar.gz, might as well just make it binary by default and have a nice interface (journald) on top

Downvoting is a legitimate tool of expressing your disagreement.

I was genuinely looking for alternatives to systemd, just because I was curious.

I stumbled upon: https://nosystemd.org/

The anger sits deep. What a beautiful sight.

Palestine

Well, perhaps Palestine is not controversial at all?

You can't read a text file without a program either.

There are complicits.

They could have been two commands that call a single parent command with different options. For example, imagine if cat had an option -N to restrict the number of lines that was printed, and also an option -t to start from the end. head would just proxy to cat -N and tail would proxy to cat -N -t. Combining the three into a single implementation reduces total LoC and opportunity for bugs. Also reduces total maintenance burden.

I believe busybox is like this actually - a ton of Unix commands in a single package. It's used by Alpine Linux, a tiny and performance linux distro commonly used by docker containers.

Even systems that use text logs, compress logs using logrotate and you have to uncompress before you can read them. Also since the compressed tar.gz logs are a bunch of separate files, if you don't have an exact date of what you're looking for, you have to uncompress and search through all of them. I much prefer just using journalctl

It probably also works, depending on your audience.

*but I don't want to be free like that, fixed it for you

Every time I read anything from Lennart (systemd creator, as I understand), that's some self-entitled crap

That site is unusable on FF mobile.

It has some craptastic scroll animation thing happening and have disabled the FF reader mode somehow.

Which is a shame, I'd like to have read it :-(

Yes and so do simple CLI tools that work. Head and Tail are about the worst examples because they work very well and also do very different things.

... and yet not a single one of you have ever donated to cURL

I mean ive donated time to curl. And I did a one time one like years and years ago and got some stickers.

You doing ok?

The way they do it is fundamentally different. Head just reads until number of newlines is the target number. Tail has to first read the entire file and keep a buffer of the file and/or offsets for each line ending to determine what the last 10 (or so) lines are.

This idiot (Gabriel) probably thinks exclusively in the real world paper line analog.

I also just looked at each program's command line options and they're identical. Less things only Tail can do (because they're fundamentally different operations)

Busybox is literally just a bundle. That's its whole purpose. It doesn't reimplement anything.

I avoid relying on it too much and don't make any especially custom configurations. I honestly don't like it. But the alternatives just never really seemed much better, so I use it by default. If there were a truly good replacement with good documentation and examples, I'd adopt it.

That's easy: If it's a service reasonably expected to be present on most desktop systems, it's part of systemd or will eventually be.

How is GNOME integrated with systemd?

Works on my machine

pee

Debian works fine without systemd, there's even a page in the wiki detailing how to install without it, or switch if you dud install systemd by mistake.

Jokes are usually funny though

I agree, though my biggest headache has been with systemd handling mounts. You have to modify a ton of units to add After and Required to make sure the NFS shares you have in fstab get mounted before starting services that depend on them. And then if the package maintainer updates their unit files, all your changes disappear!

Such a huge headache compared to the classic init.d that mounted everything very early -- with just the occasional "boot delayed a couple seconds because your share was offline" or such.