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.

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blibble 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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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jorvi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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direwolf20 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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. 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.

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blibble an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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jorvi 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

> 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.

	▲	direwolf20 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Is it possible for up to mean that, or does up actually mean that?

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jacquesm an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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blibble an hour ago | parent [-]

everyone attacking Microslop for a bug where Windows won't shut down properly

well, systemd's got them beat there!

	▲	direwolf20 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.