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Comment by elehack | Hacker News Reader

> However, in my mind it has made several awesome things possible. My boot time got dramatically shorter when I adopted it thanks to parallelization. Besides, daemons have now simple and robust service definitions. Sys V had become a mess!

Writing daemon startup files was somehting I always dreaded, and never really did well.

Before systemd, if I needed to run services I'd try to use daemontools (for auto-restart, and logging), but then I had two service-starting services running my system. Upstart had some of the features, but was still finicky (and the versions I had available didn't consistently have good service supervision support).

systemd just fix that.

Also, with systemd, for the first time I feel like I'm really using Linux, not just a random *Nix that has adequate drivers.

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so you're saying without systemd linux isnt linux.

Not quite.

I'm saying that systemd makes the Linux kernel's feature set and capabilities visibly usable from user-space. For (nearly) the first time, it feels like it matters that I'm using Linux.

Linux is still Linux without systemd, it just doesn't provide as much benefit (aside from device support and compatibility) over, say, FreeBSD without software that takes advantage of its feature set.

What stopped you from using Linux-specific features before systemd? They were accessible from userspace well before systemd came along.

The lack of documented software that used them to enable useful (to me) functionality.

I was using some of them, such as kvm for my virtualization and lvm for disk management. But systemd still had a substantial 'oh, wow, Linux lets process management be this easy and powerful?' factor, showing me something new that I hadn't seen in my use of any other system (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, a touch of Mac).

the documentation directory of the kernel source is actually pretty nice. theres a bunch of utilities for things like cgroups, namespaces, etc. they're not well known but they work perfectly fine.

I suspect its not well known because there was no commercial, marketing drive behind them. Nowadays at least one of these seems to be needed to even gain visibility. People don't go search what's cool/good where it is. They wait for HN or some other news website to tell them

Just like the regular news really. Turns out it doesn't work all that great.

Setting up and running services like the OS does, but as non-root user, is kind of a big deal for my use case.

Perhaps I'm ignorant and this was always possible.

systemd makes Linux not Unix.

There are so many things that make GNU/Linux not UNIX...

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