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Comment by dijit

3 hours ago

You think?

It took us nearly a decade and a half to unfuck the pulseaudio situation and finally arrive at a simple solution (pipewire).

SystemD has a lot more people refining it down but a clean (under the hood) implementation probably won't be witnessed in my lifetime.

yeah, the fix for pulseaudio was to throw it away entirely

for systemd, I don't think I have a single linux system that boots/reboots reliably 100% of the time these days

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

    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.

    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.

    I was today years old when I realised this is true for both bits of poetter-ware. Weird.

    • 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

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