Comment by dijit

I only use debian

pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset

with pipewire, I've never had to even touch it

systemd: yesterday I had a network service on one machine not start up because the IP it was trying to bind to wasn't available yet

the dependencies for the .service file didn't/can't express the networking semantics correctly

this isn't some hacked up .service file I made, it's that from an extremely popular package from a very popular distro

(yeah I know, use a socket activated service......... more tight coupling to the garbage software)

the day before that I had a service fail to start because the wall clock was shifted by systemd-timesyncd during startup, and then the startup timeout fired because the clock advanced more than the timeout

then the week before that I had a load of stuff start before the time was synced, because chrony has some weird interactions with time-sync.target

it's literally a new random problem every other boot because of this non-deterministic startup, which was never a problem with traditional init or /etc/rc

for what? to save maybe a second of boot time

if the distro maintainers don't understand the systemd dependency model after a decade then it's unfit for purpose

"The trick is the same: use a popular linux distribution and don't fight the kinks."

I believe that you are genuinely being sincere here, thinking this is good advice.

But this is an absolutely terrible philosophy. This statement is ignorant as well as inconsiderate. (again, I do believbe you don't intend to be inconsiderate consciously, that is just the result.)

It's ignorant of history and inconsiderate of everyone else but yourself.

Go back a few years and this same logic says "The trick is, just use Windows and do whatever it wants and don't fight."

So why in the world are you even using Linux at all in the first place with that attitude? For dishonest reasons (when unpacked to show the double standard).

Since you are using Linux instead of Windows, then you actually are fine with fighting the tide. You want the particular bits of control you want, and as long as you are lucky enough to get whatever you happen to care about without fighting too much, then you have no sympathy for anyone else who cares aboiut anything else.

You don't see yourself as fighting any tides because you are benefitting from being able to use a mainstream distro without customizing it. But the only reason you get to enjoy any such thing at all in the first place is because a lot of other people before you fought the tide to bring some mainstream distros into existence, and actually use them for ordinary activities enough despite all the difficulties, to force at least some companies and government agencies to acknowledge them. So now you can say things like "just use a mainstream distro as it comes and don't try to do what you actually want".

> The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way.

Incorrect. I used mainstream distro, still had issues, that just solved itself moving to pipewire. Issues like it literally crashing or emitting spur of max volume noise once every few months for no discernable reason.

Pulseaudio also completely denies existence of people trying to do music on Linux, there is no real way to make latency on it be good.

> SystemD is very opinionated, so you'd assume it wouldn't have the same results, but it does.. if you use a popular distro then they've done a lot of the hard work that makes systemd function smooth.

Over the years of using the "opinion" of SystemD seems to be "if it is not problem on Lennart's laptop, it's not a real problem and it can be closed or ignored completely".

For example systemd have no real method to tell it "turn off all apps after 5 minutes regardless of what silly package maintainers think". Now what happens if you have a server on UPS that have say 5 minutes of battery and one of the apps have some problem and doesn't want to close?

In SysV, it gets killed, and system gets remounted read only. You have app crash recovery but at least your filesystem is clean In systemd ? No option to do that. You can set default timeout but it can be override in each service so you'd have to audit every single package and tune it to achieve that. That was one bug that was closed.

Same problem also surfaced if you have say app with a bug that prevented it from closing from sigterm and you wanted to reboot a machine. Completely stuck

But wait, there is another method, systemd have an override, you can press (IIRC) ctrl+alt+delete 7 times within 2 seconds to force it to restart ( which already confuses some people that expect it to just restart machine clean(ish) regardless https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11285 ).

...which is also impossible if your only method of access is software KVM where you need to navigate to menu to send ctrl+alt+del. So I made ticket with proposal to just make it configurable timeout for the CAD ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/29616 ), the ticket wasn't even read completely because Mr. Poettering said "this is not actionable, give a proposal", so I pasted the thing he decided to ignore in original ticket, and got ignored. Not even "pull requests welcome" (which I'd be fine with, I just wanted confirmation that the feature like that won't be rejected if I start writing it).

There is also issue of journald disk format being utter piece of garbage ("go thru entire journal just to get app's last few lines bad", hundreds of disk reads on simple systemctl status <appname> bad) that is consistently ignored thru many tickets from different people.

Or the issue that resolvconf replacement in systemd will just roll a dice on DNS ordering, but hey, Mr. Lennart doesn't use openvpn so it's not real issue ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/27543 )

I'm not writing it to shit on systemd and praise what was before, as a piece of software it's very useful for my job as sysadmin (we literally took tens of thousands lines of fixed init scripts out because all of the features could be achieved in unit files) and I mean "saved tons of time and few demons running" in some cases, but Mr. Poettering is showing same ignorant "I know better" attitude he got scolded at by kernel maintainers.