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Comment by frankharv | Hacker News Reader

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frankharv

I have but one word for this guy.

Devuan

I see no reason not to consider it.

He is a Debian user who hates the way systemd works.

Devuan is for you.

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He doesn't even know how to read man pages (journald.conf(5) describes the setup he is looking for), and he doesn't know how memory usage on Linux works (shared /mmap()ed memory is counted for each process). Do you really think his issues go away when he switches to Devuan? He'll probably just yell at different clouds

Other than that, Devuan is a solid choice for people who want to get rid of systemd. It comes with the Debian-typical rather old versions of most programs, but I guess for a file server it doesn't matter much if you run kernel 4.19 or 5.15

The systemd man pages are a book. And, just for avoidance of doubt, that's not a good thing. I am never surprised when someone can't find out how to configure systemd to do what they want. It's just too enterprise grade.

journald.conf(5) is ~2500 words and ~230 lines on a terminal 130 chars wide. Not exactly a book. systemd-journald(8) is ~220 lines and systemd(1) is ~750 lines. Big? yes. But nothing compared to some other man-pages (ever tried `man gcc` or `man bash`?)

People complain about how bad or non-existing Linux's man-pages are compared to the BSDs, and then systemd comes along with a really extensive and well-written set of manpages and people complain that it's too much

Can't make everyone happy I guess...

I recently got a new work laptop and decided to take the opportunity to switch from using windows 10 with a linux VM (please don't try to sell me WSL2, I'm not interested) to plain linux. I decided to pick devuan stable since the base machine needs to be... stable. I have no interest in using systemd on anything which needs to be stable. I feel happy for anyone who has never encountered severe stability issues with systemd but I am not that person. Devuan comes with sysvinit which is also trash but it offers the opportunity to use other inits. At this point in time I have switched it from sysvinit to runit and eventually ripped out the entire runit infrastructure that comes with devuan and replaced it with something heavily inspired by void's runit. This isn't great, it would be nice if devuan took things other than sysvinit+initscripts more seriously. Maybe even just switch to OpenRC since, while it is still not great (please stop using pid files) it's a hell of a lot more sane than the mess of init scripts devuan ships with.

It depends what you're doing but for my "workstation", Devuan is indeed working flawlessly. I'm running it since six months or so on my main PC (a little Ryzen 3700X / 32 GB or RAM) and I'm very happy with it.

Now if you're a sysadmin and have come to rely on systemd and are now locked in, Devuan is obviously not for you. But if you're running Linux on a desktop or on a laptop and aren't a fan of systemd, Devuan is great.

Three cheers for Devuan! :). Completely agree, this would've been an easy distro switch-a-rooni ..

I switched all my Debian to Devuan. Havent looked back.

if you run a Debian-based production server, then Devuan is for you.

Devuan can allow your precious daemon to stay up despite netdev going offline, unlike systemd-networkd which would kill the daemon.

This is quite important if your large ling-running daemon has statefulness data.

As someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread, so can systemd, your service did what it was configured to do. If you want the service to stay up when netdev goes down, then don't tell systemd that netdev is a hard requirement for your service.

Its never a good systemd-networkd default to be killing daemon whenever a netdev goes “cricket”.

But that's just it, to say this just demonstrates you don't understand the systemd service model.

There is no "system default" in the loop here at all. The service told systemd that it cannot operate without netdev, and systemd behaved accordingly. If the config was written more appropriately, it would have behaved accordingly. The "default" is what you had written in the unit file.

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