I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.

▲ shevy-java 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not just systemd, though. You have to look at the whole picture, like the design of GNOME or how GTK is now basically a GNOMEy toolkit only (and if you dare point this out on reddit, ebassi may go ballistics). They kind of take more and more control over the ecosystem and singularize it for their own control. This is also why I see the "wayland is the future", in part, as means to leverage away even more control; the situation is not the same, as xorg-server is indeed mostly just in maintenance work by a few heroes such as Alanc, but wayland is primarily, IMO, a IBM Red Hat project. Lo and behold, GNOME was the first to mandate wayland and abandon xorg, just as it was the first to slap down systemd into the ecosystem too.

▲

WD-42 11 hours ago | parent [-]

The usual semi conspiratorial nonsense. GNOME is only unusable to clickers that are uncomfortable with any UI other than what was perfected by windows 95. And Wayland? Really? Still yelling at that cloud?

▲

IshKebab 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I expect people will stop yelling about Wayland when it works as reliably as X, which is probably a decade away. I await your "works for me!" response.

▲

TingPing 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s very fair you can say “X works for me” but everyone saying otherwise is in the wrong.

▲

IshKebab 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't get your point. People regularly complain that Wayland has lots of remaining issues and there are always tedious "you're wrong because it works perfectly for me!" replies, as if the fact that it works perfectly for some people means that it works perfectly for everyone.

	▲	TingPing an hour ago \| parent [-]
		My point was the exact same sentiment applies to X. It lacks things Wayland does. So X is only fine for some people.

▲

drnick1 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These days Wayland is MUCH smoother than X11 even with an Nvidia graphics cards. With X11, I occasionally had tearing issues or other weird behavior. Wayland fixed all of that on my gaming PC.

▲ Cyph0n 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s even more pleasant when you use a distro that natively uses systemd and provides light abstractions on top. One such example is NixOS.

▲ allreduce 8 hours ago | parent [-]

NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as a NixOS user).

Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part because of systemd and all the other crap you have to wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux desktop. Better to have a fat programming language, runtime and collection of packages which exposes one declarative interface.

Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design, which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.

▲ Cyph0n 5 hours ago | parent [-]

How is it not a light abstraction? If you're familiar with systemd, you can easily understand what the snippet below is doing even if you know nothing about Nix.

    systemd.services.rclone-photos-sync = {
      serviceConfig.Type = "oneshot";
      path = [ pkgs.rclone ];
      script = ''
        rclone \
          --config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \
          --bwlimit 20M --transfers 16 \
          sync /mnt/photos/originals/ photos:
      '';
      unitConfig = {
        RequiresMountsFor = "/mnt/photos";
      };
    };
    systemd.timers.rclone-photos-sync = {
      timerConfig = {
        # Every 2 hours.
        OnCalendar = "00/2:00:00";
        # 5 minute jitter.
        RandomizedDelaySec = "5m";
        # Last run is persisted across reboots.
        Persistent = true;
        Unit = "rclone-photos-sync.service";
      };
      partOf = [ "rclone-photos-sync.service" ];
      wantedBy = [ "timers.target" ];
    };

In my view, using Nix to define your systemd services beats copying and symlinking files all over the place :)

▲

allreduce 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Hah I just wrote something similar today to periodically push backups to another server from my NAS.

I agree the systemd interface is rather simple (just translate nix expression to config file). But NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language and filesystem standard to somehow merge everything together, and then declare approximately every package to ever exist in this new language + add a boatloat of extra utilities and infra.

	▲	Cyph0n 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was referring to working with systemd specifically on NixOS. But yes, the Nix ecosystem is not easy to learn, but once it clicks there is no going back.