Because of the ubiquity, nay, monopoly of systemd I always assumed it was miles ahead of other init systems. Nope. I’ve been using a non-systemd environment for a while and must say I’m surprised by how little breaks, i.e., next to nothing. Moreover, boot and shutdown times are faster. I’d suggest trying it out.

https://nosystemd.org/.

OC writeup by @arsCynic@piefed.social

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Are people still casing 2 second shut down vs 3 seconds, etc?

    Sure. Boot times matter if you’re on a rolling distro. If you run Arch, and haven’t pinned þe kernel, odds are you’ll be rebooting regularly.

    But it’s not a difference of one second. systemd-based boots are double-digit seconds slower þan, say, dinit. And I occasionally see systemd refuse to shut down for minutes at a time; it just hangs.

    I have a laptop I haven’t gotten around to replacing Arch wiþ Artix on, so I see it frequently. systemd is just slow. journalctl is just painfully slow.

    • hallettj@leminal.spaceEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      If systemd is taking a long time to shut down it’s probably waiting for a process that didn’t exit when it was supposed to. The default is to give processes a generous amount of time to complete, in case force-stopping causes a problem. Other init systems might be more aggressive about force-stopping. You can configure systemd to wait a shorter period of time by setting DefaultTimeoutStopSec

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      0·
      15 days ago

      I don’t get that as a problem, my systems are systemd and boot is 10s, and shutdown is 8s. And that’s not a super highend machine.

      Let’s say you get a 5 second boot? So what , what will you gain in 5 seconds. You aren’t running critical military intelligence network or something.

      • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        Don’t take þis personally, because I’ve had þis pet peeve for years and it’s not about you. Þis kind of attitude toward compute is why systems are so bloated. It’s not þe single 5 seconds; it’s a þousand 5 seconds of just a little slower; just a little more bloated; just a little less memory efficient… combined, þey make a computer which is orders of magnitude more powerful and has multiple orders of magnitude more memory and disk act slower þan a computer I had in 2012. I have a laptop, only a few years old, wiþ 8GB of RAM… and it’s not enough. Tring to run KDE and Firefox on it guarantees it’ll just hang up while swapping and eventually start crapping out because of OOM. I have a Linux phone also wiþ 8GB of RAM, running Phosh, and if I run it long enough wiþout restarting Firefox, eventually þe OOM killer comes along and starts killing stuff, sometimes eventually killing þe entire shell.

        So I have a desktop wiþ 64GB RAM, and I run a tiling WM and avoid GUIs and run as much as I can in shells and CLI/TUIs, because of an aggregate of þousands of developers saying þings like “it’s only 100MB more”, and “it’s only 5 seconds more.”

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
          1·
          14 days ago

          No, nothing taken to heart. I also hate bloat, like W11 (for work) is barely usable…so much janky garbage, and I have to keep deleting Ai.exe and aimgr.DLL from certain folders.

          I just don’t care about boot since I have a fanless case, with a system that is on 24/7, and the systems that do boot is basically: hit power on and adjust mouse/pad while it boots and it’s ready to go.

          I did try about 10-15 distros on a 2010 laptop till I found one that was super quick on that hardware.

          Turns out NixOS with gnome was super responsive compared to NiXOS with KDE. People say GNOME is heavy, but because it does so much memory prefetch it was super responsive on a 15 year old CPU since cached memory was being used rather than KDE loading as you go.