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Comment by catalogia | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people (including me) learned about it the hard way when their tmux sessions began mysteriously disappearing. The solution is KillUserProcesses=no in /etc/systemd/logind.conf

Some systemd advocates say the critics are just upset at change. I don't dislike change in general, but changing defaults out from under me? Defaults like this? That irks me. I lost a several tmux sessions before I realized what was happening. I thought I was doing something wrong because SystemD violated my expectations so severely.

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Turns out some people like to force change upon others. They will always win out. These same people are oblivious to cause and effect.

I remember reading on HN at the time, how the systemD folks opened a bug report (or some such similar) on the tmux github because systemD was disappearing those tmux sessions, and their solution was for tmux to change how they managed persistency. Tmux stood their ground, and I think that's why KillUserProcesses=yes isn't still default. (iirc)

A system-wide setting when the objective is user process control behavior? Really? Just wow.

multi-user system, user logs out, do you want to have buggy software still hanging around?

The whole point is for the administrators to be able to avoid users running long-running processes on shared systems (e.g. university systems).

> multi-user system, user logs out, do you want to have buggy software still hanging around?

Of course not. But I do want to have the nohup software they have running to keep running when they log out.

> The whole point is for the administrators to be able to avoid users running long-running processes on shared systems (e.g. university systems).

Right, which is why it should be possible to do this. The issue is that the default behavior has changed from honoring nohup to not honoring nohup. Defaulting to honoring nohup is what's expected, and is reasonable.

Why did the sessions disappear? Can you explain more about it?

Systemd can be configured to kill all processes belonging to a user when he or she closes the last login shell. Some people had this enabled on their servers and were surprised that their tmux/screen sessions kept disappearing.

This is a bit disingenuous; people didn't just "have it enabled", it was made a default despite a lot of concern that it was such a radical departure from the normal behavior.

Some people? Do you mean everyone who's distro did not change the default value?

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