alt Hacker News> What makes you say that? You can set the PATH right in the crontab.
OK but I don't want to hardcode $PATH in the crontab just so I can test the cronjob. Barring the hardcode, $PATH is one thing when cron runs and another when you try out the command yourself. systemctl start foo.service starts the command inside with the same environment as when the timer fires so you know it'll work the same.
On the flip side, your cron job will run at the time you specify in the crontab. Your systemd timer, on the other hand, may fire at the specified time (and most of the time, it will), but it can also suddenly stop firing once it has fired on a February 29th and then never fire again, due to logic bugs in systemd, or it may or may not fire when you "restart" the timer unit, due to logic bugs in systemd (that's when it only has OnCalendar, so yes, definitely a bug).
> $PATH is one thing when cron runs and another when you try out the command yourself.
Why would that be different with systemd timers? If my ~/.bashrc adds /opt/foo/bin, that's also not part of the systemd timer's PATH, right?
But I guess you're saying the ability to trigger the systemd timer off-schedule is the difference? Yeah, it's annoying with cron to have to temporarily set the trigger two minutes into the future. :-P
Not sure adding that feature justifies a complete rewrite, but certainly a nice addition.
> due to logic bugs in systemd
Yeah my main gripe with systemd and other Lennartware is the extremely low implementation quality, not necessarily the ideas. Though the idea of killing tmux/screen on logout is downright criminal. And the fd passing nonsense[1] for system services is clearly just the idea of a child that found a tool and is misusing it.
[1] which is an awesome and underused feature (https://blog.habets.se/2025/10/The-strange-webserver-hot-pot...), but completely misapplied by systemd.