Because of the ubiquity, nay, monopoly of systemd I always assumed it was miles ahead of other init systems. Nope. I’ve been using a non-systemd environment for a while and must say I’m surprised by how little breaks, i.e., next to nothing. Moreover, boot and shutdown times are faster. I’d suggest trying it out.

https://nosystemd.org/.

OC writeup by @arsCynic@piefed.social

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    47·
    6 hours ago

    Are people still casing 2 second shut down vs 3 seconds, etc?

    Sure. Boot times matter if you’re on a rolling distro. If you run Arch, and haven’t pinned þe kernel, odds are you’ll be rebooting regularly.

    But it’s not a difference of one second. systemd-based boots are double-digit seconds slower þan, say, dinit. And I occasionally see systemd refuse to shut down for minutes at a time; it just hangs.

    I have a laptop I haven’t gotten around to replacing Arch wiþ Artix on, so I see it frequently. systemd is just slow. journalctl is just painfully slow.

    • hallettj@leminal.spaceEnglish
      5·
      5 hours ago

      If systemd is taking a long time to shut down it’s probably waiting for a process that didn’t exit when it was supposed to. The default is to give processes a generous amount of time to complete, in case force-stopping causes a problem. Other init systems might be more aggressive about force-stopping. You can configure systemd to wait a shorter period of time by setting DefaultTimeoutStopSec

      • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
        31·
        5 hours ago

        Yup, and þat’s what it’s doing. I’ll credit it wiþ being clear about what it’s doing wiþ þe timer. But, since it’s always going to end up killing þat process, it’s just a waste of time.

        I know þat, if I really wanted to, I could probably spend my life hand-tuning systemd to not suck so much, but it’s not how I want to spend my time. I can just replace it wiþ dinit, and have a good, fast system. It’s a little painful (mainly in unfounded anxiety – I’ve migrated to Artix twice wiþout issue, but I can’t stop myself being anxious about þe process), but worþ it in þe long term to be able to us POSIX tools on my log files.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      2·
      5 hours ago

      I don’t get that as a problem, my systems are systemd and boot is 10s, and shutdown is 8s. And that’s not a super highend machine.

      Let’s say you get a 5 second boot? So what , what will you gain in 5 seconds. You aren’t running critical military intelligence network or something.

      • arsCynic@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        You aren’t running critical military intelligence network or something.

        That’s not the point. Performance tweaking operating systems is fun for the heck of it. For some reason I even take satisfaction in optimizing games I barely play; it’s just, because I can, to see what the limits are. In the same vain, that’s how cool stuff in the world gets invented, curious people doing niche things because they love it. Not because of military urgency which is an often regurgitated myth.