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Comment by cakes | Hacker News Reader

Though I'm not going to say I really care for sysvinit - I prefer it to systemd as well. Every interaction I've had with systemd just ends up confusing me until I either successfully get it work _somehow_ outside of logic I can actually comprehend or giving up entirely. A lot of people I know have had similar experiences.

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I used to be on the fence. I knew I hated journald with a passion. But for systemd, the last straw was trying to mount a USB drive one day. I would do "mount", and nothing was mounted. I looked through the logs and noticed it was being unmounted on mount. What the fuck, right? Turns out, a prior unmount of a USB stick killed some service that systemd runs. So systemd thinks the service is dead, which means it should not be mounted, which means it keeps umounting the damn thing. Totally braindead.

That's also when I learned systemd was running an entire virtual fstab layer. Because, you know, /etc/fstab just isn't good enough anymore.

This is actually a good thing. You might have found it bothersome, but what it was doing was intelligently trying to reason whether a device would cause problems in your machine. It did not make the correct decision, but the infrastructure is there.

I would file a bug on systemd mentioning this behavior. But I like the fact that that my usb wifi card will not screw my system.

I don't want intelligent tools. The smarter the tool the more difficult it is to fix when it inevitably breaks. The intelligence might save a few minutes every so often, but the failures can cost hours, and at a time when you might urgently need things to work correctly. Predictability is more valuable.

> You might have found it bothersome, but what it was doing was intelligently trying to reason whether a device would cause problems in your machine.

What was intelligent about that?

I don't need intelligent tools, I need tools that do what I say! That's why they're tools, damn it!

This sounds very strange. Could you add a bit more detail. Which service crashed? Same service that caused the unmount? Any log messages?

Interesting perspective. My experience has been the complete opposite - writing unit scripts used to be a real pain, but systemd unit files take two minutes and just work every time.

My machines start much faster with systemd too, which is a nice side effect.

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