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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • What does exactly systemd do?

    It mostly causes heated discussions and a feeling of nostalgia for simpler times.

    When your computer finishes loading the kernel, you have to tell it what to do next. There are dozens of systems and services that have to run (once or keep running) for everything to work. Mounting your disk partitions, bringing the networking up, starting the GUI, initializing all kinds of services, etc.

    Once upon a time most (all?) distros used sysVinit, adapted from Unix’s System V to do that. It was simple and very easy to understand and setup: Very basically the init program would call scripts by alphanumerical order (passing “start” to scripts starting with S and “stop” to ones starting with K). You’d place these scripts in /etc/rcX.d, X being a number, the runlevel (and you had just a handful of runlevels, like halt, reboot, single user, gui, etc). Want to run something between starting the network and bringing up sshd? Just create a script in /etc/init.d and link it to /etc/rcX.d naming it SNNmyscript, with NN being a number between the ones in SNNnetwork and SNNsshd. Want to disable a service? Change its script name from S… to K… Change startup sequences? Just change the NN.

    Beautiful. But although it worked perfectly for most of us, it did have deficiencies. An obvious one is that it ran these scripts sequentially. Even if your computer was using 0.1% of its power to run each of them, you’d be waiting for each one to run in a single queue.

    So a very nice and polite guy came up with systemd. Instead of simple scripts running sequentially, you could now create “unit files”, describing each “thing to do”, for what “targets” (similar to runlevels) that thing is needed, which scripts to run to make that thing happen, and which previous things should have been done before this thing (dependencies). With this, your computer can fire up multiple startup scripts (and stopping scripts) at the same time, only making sure to queue stuff so dependencies are met. For example, you don’t need to wait for sshd to start your database server, but you do need networking before you mount shared disks.

    That made boot times much better, but at the cost of complexity and maintainability (and here come heated discussions…).

    The problem is that not everyone wanted that tradeoff, but systemd was shoved down everyone’s throat as most (all?) distros adopted it.

    So init freedom is a reaction to that, offering you the option of multiple init systems (there are more than just sysVinit and systemd).

    No offense to all the other init systems, but I’d stick with sysV if you’re really after simplicity and backwards compatibility with most older systems (and the old ways), or systemd, because it became the de facto standard, it’s faster and more modern.

    Should you care? If you have to ask this, then no.

    If you had to craft your own init scripts and configurations, and had a ton of legacy scripts, or maybe were building very simple barebones systems, or very complex, always changing startup scenarios and targets or runlevels, or want to exercise your “freedom” just for the heck of it, then you could care.

    If you’re a distro hopper (i.e. are more dedicated to “use Linux” than to use applications which run on Linux), having tried 5 different init systems may be one more thing to brag about in distro hopper meetings.

    If you’re getting into Linux to learn Linux administration for career purposes, systemd is what you’ll find in commercial systems.

    If you’re after an OS to just be an OS (i.e. just run your programs), just pick a well supported (community) and mainstream one, it will most likely come with systemd, and you’ll probably never need to touch systemd. My wife (not technical) has been using exclusively Linux for 15+ years, and I can assure you with 100% certainty that she doesn’t know which init system is there, or what is systemd or sysV.

    If you’re new to Linux, curious and want to learn all you can about it, I’d say there are many other interesting and useful things in Linux to learn and care about before you go down this rabbit hole, summoning some nice nostalgic but outdated tech from the dead.


  • Haha, I guess many dog owners just can’t see it how it is; probably an addiction to the lopsided unconditional “love”. I used to comment something similar back in Reddit, just to see the flood of downvotes and outraged dog owners.

    Same reaction to supporting the idea that some breeds are generally more dangerous and/or more aggressive. “Oh, my MY pitbull is a sweetie!!” (adding this here just to test :D )



  • Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.






  • Suppose kubuntu, ubuntu, lubuntu, xubuntu were packages to be installed on top of debian.

    How would you do that? Debian would not create and maintain a “core debian” variant just to be installed then receive the extra packages. Would the *ubuntu packages replace, instead of add on top of default debian packages?

    Then where would the updates come from? Both debian and *ubuntu repositories?

    What about dependencies? Would debian have to coordinate with all *ubuntu maintainers (and they too, between them) for compatibility tests every time debian needed to update one of its packages? Or they’d just update and *ubuntu would have to scramble to release fixes for what had been broken?

    Not to mention convenience; would you have to download debian, download *ubuntu, install debian, then your *ubuntu?

    Why not then package the “core debian”, with the tested component versions that work with the *ubuntu packages you’re downloading? Hey, and what about script the installation to install both “core debian” parts and then *ubuntu automatically? That’s an innovative idea indeed. No, wait, isn’t it sort of what they already do today?

    It’s not like there’s a Linux headquarters with a centralized organization that releases all multiple distros just to feed the hobby of distro hoppers. Distros are maintained and packaged by different people, and it’s already a lot of trouble to keep each part in sync.


  • Yeah, let’s embed a MS Word window in the interface instead of the text box, for a full wysiwyg user friendly experience. It could check the user’s environment and log in to Office365 using their credentials, thus having access to their templates and onedrive too.

    Hey, hey, what about… Teams integration? That would be super user friendly. We could read, comment and post directly from our cosy familiar Microsoft friendliness, never ever needing to know, worry or care about any underlying technology.

    But wait! I clearly remember having to know, worry and care about how to use wysiwyg editors. Can’t we instead go back to using raw latex tags and vi as the post/comment interface?




  • Instead of going vegan or not having kids, I died when I was 5. Because living also creates more greenhouse gasses.

    In fact, having a small footprint is just a matter of choosing how miserable you’re willing to make your life.

    Unfortunately the Earth cannot sustainably support so many people living COMFORTABLY, and eating WHATEVER WE LIKE. The more people, the more miserable is the globally sustainable way of life.

    Curbing population growth - not Thanos-like, but through education and availability of contraceptive methods - is the only way we can all have the cake (and the meat) and eat it.

    Many wealthy countries have their population declining. Maybe if we get to the same level of wealthiness everywhere, less people would engage in procreation.

    In any case, if we just do nothing and the doomsday evangelists are even nearly right, extreme weather, plage and famine caused by climate change will indeed curb the population. Eventually it reaches equilibrium.

    In this case, the faster we get to the edge of the abyss, the quicker the situation will solve itself.