Yeah, it’s not really advertised as an init system anymore. It’s an entire system management suite, and when seen from that angle, it’s pretty good at it too. All of it is consistent, it’s fairly powerful, and it’s usually 10-20 lines of unit files to describe what you want. I wanted that for a long time.
I feel like the hate always comes from the people that treat the UNIX philosophy like religion. And even then, systemd is very modular, just also well integrated together: networkd manages my network, resolved manages my DNS, journald manages my logs, timesyncd manages my NTP, logind manages my logins and sessions, homed mounts my users profiles on demand.
Added complexity, yes, but I’ve been using the hell out of it. Start services when a specific peripheral is plugged in? Got it. Automatically assign devices to seats? Logind’s got you covered, don’t even need to mess with xorg configs. VM network? networkd handles it. DNS caching? Out of the box. Split DNS? One command. Don’t want 2000 VMs rotating their logs at exactly midnight and trashing your ceph cluster? Yep just slap a RandomizedDelaySec=24h to the units. Isolate and pin a VM to dedicated cores dynamically? Yep it’ll do that. Services that needs to run on a specific NUMA node to stay close to PCIe peripherals? Yep easy. All very easily configurable with things like Ansible or bash provisioning scripts.
Sure it may not be for everybody, but it solves real problems real Linux admins have to deal with at scale. If you don’t like it, sysvinit still works just fine and I heard good things about runit too. It’s an old and tired argument, it’s been over 10 years, we can stop whining about it and move on. There’s plenty of non-systemd distros to use.
I expected this to be “another one of those” but actually from what my instance has about you, you were indeed correct. Gaming distros with exclusive features lmao.
IMO that’s some of the gamer logic bleeding over in the Linux side, now that Linux gaming is taking off. They’ll do anything including install dubious Linux distros barely hanging together with duct tape for a perceived extra 2 FPS. Download software exclusively distributed on Discord? Hell yeah. I’m sure at least one of them boots with mitigations=off and it’s not clearly indicated that it does.
We’re seeing the same thing on the Windows side with modified Windows ISOs like the whole AtlasOS, that rightfully made some security experts sound the alarm. Some did things like completely strip off the updates, antivirus and firewall. Unless your system is exclusively running Steam and firewalled off the network, this is a certified bad idea.
I’d probably trust Nobara because the guy clearly knows his shit, but some of them really are just some other guy’s riced up Arch snapshot. They may give the impression everything just works at first but I’ve definitely seen examples of it falling apart. Even bigger distros like Pop_OS! had major snafus like the whole Steam uninstalls your DE thing, and Manjaro still fucks up something basic every now and then. I tried some of them in a VM and they didn’t even install or boot correctly. Oh my fault that one only works for NVIDIA graphics cards not AMD, my bad.
It’s not worth arguing, it’s a user base with vastly different goals than I do, just let them have their Bedrock Linux completely blow up in multi package manager hell and soon enough they’ll come running for a saner more reliable distro.
I’m a minuscule instance. That’s fine. I like that I have control over it, how it’s maintained and updated. If I want to convert it to Mbin because I like it more, I can. I know for sure it’s going to live at least as long as I’m interested in the fediverse. Nobody can take it away from me.
Big instances are expensive to run, and in a way, they’re not exactly immune to shutting down and big instances shutting down have a much bigger impact than a small one with few communities when they go poof.
But at the same time, they do offer increased security when they work correctly. It’s like saying we shouldn’t use virtualization anymore because historically some virtual devices have been exploitable in a way that you could escape the VM. Or lately, Spectre/Meltdown. Or a bit of an older one, Rowhammer.
Sometimes, security measures open a hole while closing many others. That’s how software works unfortunately, especially in something as complex as the Linux kernel.
Using namespaces and keeping your system up to date is the best you can do as a user. Or maybe add a layer of VM. But no solution is foolproof, if you really need that much security use multiple devices, ideally airgapped ones whenever possible.
Isn’t that kind of AppImage’s whole thing, to behave like Mac apps that you just double click on regardless of where they are, and not have a package manager?
I’d go for the Flatpak if you want it to be managed and updated.
We went from distro packages to Flatpak to bare files and circling back to reinventing the package manager…
Maybe you can set up a KWin window rule to force Latte to be where you want it to be?
Not that Plasma panels work that much better than Latte in that regard, they still sometimes shift monitors just because something is plugged in (not even enabled, just plugged in!)
I really wish we could pin things to the exact monitor via its physical port location or serial number or something from EDID.
As an aside, distro doesn’t matter but should make sure realtime is set up properly for the optimal latency. That usually requires the linux-rt kernel. The default one isn’t quite as bad as it used to be, but linux-rt will be able to guarantee low latency processing without dropouts. Also worth tuning/hardcoding latencies in JACK or PipeWire if the audio delay is too big out of the box.
C bindings and APIs generally work much better in Rust because the language works a lot more like C than it does C++.
Qt depends a lot on C++ class inheritance, and even does some preprocessing of C++ files to generate code in those classes. That’s obviously not possible when using Rust. And it looks like you need a fair bit of unsafe there and there to use it at all too.
Meanwhile, GTK being a C library, its integration with Rust is much more transparent and nice.
So if you’re making a GUI Rust app, you’re just kind of better off with GTK at the moment. It’s significantly easier and nicer.
Arch is actually not as bad as many say. It’s pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues.
Not even just nowadays. My desktop is running a nearly 10 year old install. It’s so old, it not only predates the installer, it predates the “traditional” way and used the old TUI installer. It even predates the sysvinit to systemd switch! The physical computer has been ship of thesis’d twice.
Arch is surprisingly reliable. It’s not “stable” as in things change and you have to update some configs or even your own software. But it’s been so reliable I never even felt the need to go look elsewhere. It just works.
Even my Arch servers have been considerably more reliable and maintenance-free than the thousands I manage at work with lolbuntu on them. Arch does so little on its own, there’s less to go wrong. Meanwhile the work boxes can’t even update GRUB noninteractively, every now and then we have a grub update that pops a debconf screen and hangs unattended-upgrades until manually fixed and hoses up apt as a whole.
For me what planted the Linux seed is when I tried Mandrake Linux when I was 9-10ish. I didn’t end up sticking with it for all that long, but I absolutely loved trying out all those DEs. I had downloaded the full fat 5 CD version and checked almost everything during setup, so it came jam packed with all sorts of random software to try out. The games were nice, played the shit out of Frozen Bubble. I really liked Konqueror too, coming from Internet Explorer. It was pretty snappy overall. And there’s virtual desktops for more space! People were really helpful on IRC, even though I was asking about installing my Windows drivers in Wine. Unfortunately I kinda wanted games and my friends were getting annoyed we couldn’t play games on my computer.
It stuck with me however, so later on when some of my online friends were trying it out, I wanted to try it out again too. I wasn’t much into games anymore, had started coding a little bit. So on my computer went Kubuntu 7.10, and I’m still on Linux to this day.
But that seed is what taught me there’s more. I didn’t hate Windows, I wasn’t looking to replace it. I hadn’t fallen in love with FOSS yet. It was cool and different and fun. It wasn’t as sterile and as… grey as Windows 98. You could pop up some googly eyes that followed your mouse, because you could. There were all those weird DEs with all sorts of bars and features.