Which part of systemd’s config is not text-based? The only “database” it uses for configuration is the filesystem

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m a Wayland user (Hyprland, then KDE Plasma, and I’ll be giving Cosmic a fair shot), and don’t see myself returning to X and having to choose between massive screen tearing and massive input lag.

Wayland is missing many features that are required for some people or some applications. There’s no way for a multi-window application to tell the compositor where to place the windows, for example to have one window snap to and follow the other. Color profiles were implemented very recently. Wayland’s isolation of applications, while a significant improvement to security, has made remote input software and xdotool-like programs highly dependent on third-party interoperability solutions (specifically dbus and XDG Desktop Portal). The same isolation broke most accessibility tools like screen readers. Dockable windows, like the toolbars in QT Creator or QOwnNotes, are often difficult or impossible to dock back into the main window.

Because Wayland compositors have to implement all protocols (as opposed to deferring to the X.Org server; which is why wlroots is such a big deal) or rely on XDG Desktop Portal (which has never worked right for me), feature parity between compositors is never guaranteed, and especially problematic with GNOME dragging its heels.

Wayland is nowhere near feature parity with X11 today, and that is a legitimate prohibitive issue for many people. Wayland will never reach total feature parity with X11 in some areas, and that will always be prohibitive for some people.

But the worst (in my opinion) is the development process of the Wayland protocols. The proposal discussion threads read like the best and/or worst sitcom you’ve ever seen. It took them several months of back-and-forth just short of ad hominem attacks to decide how a window should set its icon. Several months for a pissing WINDOW ICON!

Various mildly understandable to braindead reasons

• “it doesn’t work”
• “breaks my workflow”
• “Xorg is better”
• “Nvidia”
• “no reason to use it”
• “being pushed by IBM”
• “no SSH forwarding”
• “has taken too long to get to current state”
• “when I last tried it 5 years ago it didn’t work”

I still have weird glitches where applications don’t seem to update on screen (chrome and firefox, both natively doing wayland).

Lack of any solution for programmatic geometry interaction. This one has been afflicted with ‘perfect is enemy of good’, as the X way of allowing manual coordinates be specified is seen as potentially too limiting (reconciling geometry with scaling, non-traditional displays), so they do nothing instead of proposing an alternative.

The different security choices also curtail functionality. Great, better security for input, uh oh, less flexibility in input solutions. The ‘share your screen’ was a mess for a long time (and might be for some others still). Good the share your screen has a better security model, but frustrating when it happened.

Inconsistent experience between Wayland implementations. Since Wayland is a reference rather than a singular server, Plasma, Gnome, and others can act a little different. Like one supporting server side decorations and another being so philosophically opposed to the concept that they refuse to cater to it. While a compositing window manager effectively owned much of the hard work even in X, the X behavior between compositors were fairly consistent.

I’ve been using Plasma as a Wayland compositor after many failed attempts, and it still has papercuts.

For one thing they were so obsessed with security as a concept devleoping it that they completely ignored the use case of screen-readers for the visually impaired and prevent apps from accessing text from other apps and as far as I know it is still an issue.

Well, Fedora 40 here as well and it just doesn’t work on my computer. Sure, Nvidia, blah blah blah. X does work flawlessly on my machine, though.

Like trying to destroy people’s lives so they can make a few dollars.

Well, I’ll tell you that I prefer systemd because I can comprehend its declarative unit files and dependency-based system a lot better than the shell script DSLs and runlevels that I’ve had to mess with in other init systems. systemctl status has a quite nice output that can be really handy when debugging units. I like being able to pull up logs for just about any service on my system with a simple journalctl command instead of researching where the log file is.

Linus had an epic flame war with the systemd idiots for breaking Linux stupidly: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/

He didn’t do anything because he made it clear he owned the kernel and userspace was someone else’s problem, but also that the systemd guys were absolute morons who were a danger to themselves and everyone else.

I’ve gotten into quite a lot of systemd-related flame wars so far, and what strikes me is that I haven’t heard a single reason why systemd is good and should be used in favor of openrc/sysvinit/whatever.

“Hi I’m new to Linux, I switched from Windows to Alpine Linux and my laptop’s battery life has gone from 6 hours to 30 minutes before needing a charge.”

Not really interested in debating with average “I run arch btw” user. We are not in the same universe, things I have to audit and maintain are not in the same universe with things you do, so having such a smart advice coming from you is not a surprise at all. I could, after all, just roll out my own distro if I am not happy, amirite?

I run systemd machines because I don’t have a choice. It doesn’t make it any less of a shit. Simple as that.

But hey, tell me some more about systemd, I am really new to all this 🤔

Thank you! This year’s even harder, but I’m hanging on!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Uh… Sounds like it’s not really system’s fault, your setup is just terrible.

I don’t know his specific issue, but the general behavior of systemd going completely nuts when something is a bit ‘off’ in some fashion that is supremely confusing. Sure, there’s a ‘mistake’, but good luck figuring out what that mistake is. It’s just systemd code tends to be awfully picky in obscure ways.

Then when someone comes along with a change to tolerate or at least provide a more informative error when some “mistake” has been made is frequently met with “no, there’s no sane world where a user should be in that position, so we aren’t going to help them out of that” or “that application does not comply with standard X”, where X is some standard the application developer would have no reason to know exists, and is just something the systemd guys latched onto.

See the magical privilege escalation where a user beginning with a number got auto-privileges, and Pottering fought fixing it because “usernames should never begin with a number anyway”.

I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.

In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.

When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.

After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).

The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.

Servers, and workloads are various- DNS, ntp, databases, a few websites, internal servers running code/apis/etc for internal processes, etc.

Systemd is trying to stop a service. To do an action to a service (or any unit), it runs a job. The job to stop a service is called a stop job. Once the stop job is taken off the job queue, the stop job is running.

The method of stopping a service is configurable, but the default is to send a kill signal to the MainPID, then wait for the process to exit. If it doesn’t, after a timeout, the kill is reattempted with a harsher signal.

Dunno, but looks at man service.unit I think)

is it overengineering or just a push back against “make each program do one thing well,” and saying yeah but I have n things to do and I only need them done, well or not I just need them done and don’t want to dig through 20 files to do it…

The thing with journalctl is that it is a database. Thus means that searching and finding things can be fast and easy in high complexity cases but it can also stall in cases with very high resource usage.

Just like windows even log