alt Hacker NewsI 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
Replies
"for what? to save a second of boot time"
Doubtful the motivation was /etc/rc being too slow
daemontools, runit, s6 solve that problem
PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons!
IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directly (memory hazy, it was a while ago). It could be a bit of a pain.
> 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
This gave me a good chuckle. Systemd literally was created to solve the awful race conditions and non-determinism in other init systems. And it has done a tremendous job at it. Hence the litany of options to ensure correct order and execution: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
And outside of esoteric setups I haven't ever encountered the problems you mentioned with service files.
For me, randomly missing NFS mounts after boot were the last straw. I could not solve this problem. I am back on sysv init.
Debian is a darling for which I will always love, but it's inability to deal with systemd is one of the prime reasons I left.
I am not seeing these kind of systemd issues with Fedora / RHEL.
It just works
I can totally relate to this, it's gotten to the point that I'm just as scared of rebooting my Linux boxes as I was of rebooting my windows machine a couple of decades ago. And quite probably more scared.