Tbh, the installer was inevitable after systemd integrated a bootloader, crafted a paritioning scheme for autodiscovery, took over user and home directory management, and topped it off with an updater and "system extensions" layering system that some immutable distros are using.

I'm not saying any of this is particularly bad but it's been very clear fot a while that systemd just wants to be an OS. With immutable systems the "distribution" part of it is reduced to a build system, and everything else can be provided by systemd and flatpak.

▲ s_ting765 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Partition autodiscovery is pretty neat. I did my archlinux install with it using this guide[0]. I have never touched /etc/fstab and I have had zero to worry about corrupting a boot with wrong fstab entries.

[0] https://walian.co.uk/arch-install-with-secure-boot-btrfs-tpm...

▲ nubinetwork an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Btrfs and zfs don't need an fstab at all, they manage their mountable filesystems internally.

	▲	s_ting765 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure. After you have located root and the boot partition which is what this addresses.

▲ simoncion 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

My searches for "systemd partition autodiscovery" lead me to [0]. In the table labeled "Table 1. Partition Type GUIDs", we find this in the Explanation section for 'SD_GPT_HOME'

  The first partition with this type UUID on the same disk as the root partition is mounted to /home/.

...you can't spread your /home and / partitions on separate disks and use this? In fact, it looks like you can't use this autodetection unless all of the partitions of interest (including your /boot/) are on the same disk? Seriously? There's also no indication that this works with LVM... which is -if true- is extremely inconvenient. The document at [1] only mentions LVM in passing, and [2] is Poettering saying "Fuck off, I don't want to support doing this with LVM".

Did I misread a document or fail to find a relevant one? If not, is this really limited to single-disk, "legacy" [3] configurations?

[0] <https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...>

[1] <https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/discoverable_par...>

[2] <https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1727>

[3] Yes, I'm considering any fixed-partition mechanism, whether MBR or GPT to be "legacy". The flexibility you get from LVM is sooooo nice.

▲ mort96 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The various Red Hat affiliated projects have so much more reason to call themselves the "OS" than GNU at this point. A Linux system with systemd for the init, systemd-networkd and NetworkManager for networking, GNOME for the desktop, systemd-boot for the bootloader, RPM/DNF as the package manager, etc. probably contains orders of magnitude more Red Hat code than GNU code even if the system uses glibc and GNU coreutils.

	▲	benterix 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Suppose someone wants to play this game, what's the point? Not to mention the fact that Gnome, even though is not a GNU project, literally means GNU Network Object Model Environment.

▲ d_tr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can't these features be toggled?

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mort96 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They're separate programs and system services which all more or less just do their own thing, just developed under the systemd umbrella. So it can't be "toggled", you can just not use the parts of systemd you don't want.

But it's meant to work as a cohesive system when everything in systemd is used together.

FWIW, I think it's great that someone is trying to make a coherent set of system services for Linux. Things tend to interoperate better when they're explicitly written to work together than when every component is meant to be hacked to work with arbitrary other services through shell script soup.

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bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's great that the same someone has formed a company called Amutable which has the sole purpose of converting Linux to a locked-down immutable OS where the users doesn't have the key.

Also it's interesting that a set of simple interfaces have worked for so long. Maybe they did something wrong that it didn't break?

See: https://www.amutable.com

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tym0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right, are any of the things mentioned in the GP really required if you only want this init?

I know they've attached all these projects to the systemd brand because they thought it would beneficial but it's hard not to wonder if we could avoid all those discussions if the umbrella project was called something different...

	▲	mort96 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, you can just run the systemd init system and not use any other systemd programs. I would probably run systemd-journald just because it's really nice to have a logging system which knows about the system services, but it's not required.