Comment by blibble
4 hours ago
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
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.
What distro?
everyone attacking Microslop for a bug where Windows won't shut down properly
well, systemd's got them beat there!
The good thing about systemd or any other Linux software is that you don't have to use it, until this company gets off the ground.
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"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.
PipeWire was also made by a guy with a lot of multimedia experience (GStreamer).
ALSA was kind of OK after mixing was enabled by default and if you didn't need to switch outputs of a running application between anything but internal speakers and headphones (which worked basically in hardware). With any additional devices that you could add and remove, ALSA became a more serious limitation, depending. You could usually choose your audio devices (including microphones) at least at the beginning of a video conference / playing a movie etc, but it was janky (unreliable, list of 20 devices for one multi-channel sound card) and needed explicit support from all applications. Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth.
I remember ALSA. Sure, it was finnicky to use `alsamixer` to unmute the master channels now and then, but I personally never had any trouble with it.
> 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.
systemd was created to solve the problems of a directory full of shell scripts. A single shell script has completely different problems. And traditional init uses inittab, which is not /etc/init.d, and works more like runit.
runit's approach is to just keep trying to start the shell script every 2 seconds until it works. One of those worse–is–better ideas, it's really dumb, and effective. You can check for arbitrary conditions and error–exit, and it will keep trying. If you need the time synced you can just make your script fail if the time is not synced.
traditional inittab is older than that and there's not any reason to use it when you could be using runit, really.
Same. I run a server with a ton of services running on it which all have what I think are pretty complex dependency chains. And I also have used Linux with systemd on my laptop. Systemd has never, once, caused me issues.
yeah, many options that are complicated beyond the understanding of the distro maintainers, and yet still don't allow expression of common semantics required to support network services reliably
like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced"
and it's not esoteric, even ListenAddress with sshd doesn't even work reliably
the ONLY piece of systemd I've not had problems with is systemd-boot, and then it turned out they didn't write that
> like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced"
"network-online.target is a target that actively waits until the network is “up”, where the definition of “up” is defined by the network management software. Usually it indicates a configured, routable IP address of some kind. Its primary purpose is to actively delay activation of services until the network has been set up."
For time sync checks, I assume one of the targets available will effectively mean a time sync has happened. Or you can do something with ExecStartPre. You could run a shell command that checks for the most recent time sync or forces one.
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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