Systemd is incredibly versatile and most people, including myself, are unaware of its full potential. Despite its usefulness, it is often overlooked due to controversy and the current state of things when it comes to software development. Begin today your journey thought Systemd's capabilities and discover how to efficiently manage systems with fewer processes than traditionally required.

After a few conversations with people on Lemmy and other places it became clear to me that most aren’t aware of what it can do and how much more robust it is compared to the usual “jankiness” we’re used to.

In this article I highlight less known features and give out a few practice examples on how to leverage Systemd to remove tons of redundant packages and processes.

And yes, Systemd does containers. :)

  • jimakososx@lemmy.ml
    5·
    1 year ago

    systemd brings much functionality. It can’t follow unix philosophy because unix is 50 years old. the whole community drama about this systemd VS sysV VS OpenRC VS whatever comes up, is funny. There are distros that are systemd-free if you wish so much to avoid it.

      • rocketeer8015@discuss.tchncs.de
        31·
        1 year ago

        This was refuted long ago. Systemd isn’t a single binary file doing everything, it’s a project that has many different binaries doing many different things. The only difference is that they are developed under one project to ensure they integrate well with each other. What your doing is like complaining that glibc tries to do everything, I mean it does open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, exit and more… Xorg would be another example of a project that does many things instead of one very well.

        • michaelrose@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Splitting something into multiple executables doesn’t make something not monolithic just like splitting a program into multiple source files doesn’t make it not a monolith. It’s not a monolith when the different component parts can be cleanly factored out, replaced, and used outside of the original context or with different versions of related components This is in fact very hard. Much harder than making a monolith.

          For instance the X11 ecosystem isn’t a good example of a monolith because its designed to make it trivial to swap in different loosely coupled components. You don’t worry about needing your window manager and X11 to come from the same commit so they actually work. You can argue that the toolbox that systemd provides it is worth it but arguing that it’s not a monolith just screams I’m not a developer.

    • michaelrose@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      People have been making services for decades and systemd is 13 years old. I kind of feel like it probably has virtually all of the options its ever going to have. Also most of what people would use such a GUI for is to start stop restart enable disable the thing people have been doing for an eternity which doesn’t require even displaying the unit file.

  • gkpy@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    systemd is great, but being disingenious isn’t helping anyone:

    chrony -> sd-timesyncd […] one less daemon

    just because it ships with systemd doesn’t mean it magically runs without it’s own process

  • mrvictory1@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Finally a systemd praise post after so many hateful remarks. I knew systemd could do dns resolving but just learned it could handle the entire network stack and replace NetworkManager. I have a question: How can services such as Apache adapt to both NM and systemd at the same time? NM and systemd have different wait-online services. You can also add systemd-analyze for boot time analysis to the list.

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      How can services such as Apache adapt to both NM and systemd at the same time? NM and systemd have different wait-online services

      If you look at the systemd unit for Apache you’ll just find After=network.target - it doesn’t wait-online at all. Apache doesn’t really care if you’re using NM or systemd-networkd, it simply queries the system (like the ip command does) to know what’s going on with the network. It was designed as recommended for moderns programs: it is aware that your network might change and listens for the appropriate signals and takes care of the binds dynamically.

  • Rune@lemmy.ml
    57·
    1 year ago

    Systemd together with NetworkManager are two pieces of software I really dislike. They go against the very Unix philosophy. I like being able to piece all the bricks together on my own, not having monolithic pieces of software that try to do everything.