jsveiga @ jsveiga @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

You're missing the share name, //192.168.50.1/sharename

It doesn't do "only" that; I was comparing it with other init systems and described their main, basic init functionality. Sorry if I didn't do it well.

What does exactly systemd do?

It mostly causes heated discussions and a feeling of nostalgia for simpler times.

When your computer finishes loading the kernel, you have to tell it what to do next. There are dozens of systems and services that have to run (once or keep running) for everything to work. Mounting your disk partitions, bringing the networking up, starting the GUI, initializing all kinds of services, etc.

Once upon a time most (all?) distros used sysVinit, adapted from Unix's System V to do that. It was simple and very easy to understand and setup: Very basically the init program would call scripts by alphanumerical order (passing "start" to scripts starting with S and "stop" to ones starting with K). You'd place these scripts in /etc/rcX.d, X being a number, the runlevel (and you had just a handful of runlevels, like halt, reboot, single user, gui, etc). Want to run something between starting the network and bringing up sshd? Just create a script in /etc/init.d and link it to /etc/rcX.d naming it SNNmyscript, with NN being a number between the ones in SNNnetwork and SNNsshd. Want to disable a service? Change its script name from S... to K... Change startup sequences? Just change the NN.

Beautiful. But although it worked perfectly for most of us, it did have deficiencies. An obvious one is that it ran these scripts sequentially. Even if your computer was using 0.1% of its power to run each of them, you'd be waiting for each one to run in a single queue.

So a very nice and polite guy came up with systemd. Instead of simple scripts running sequentially, you could now create "unit files", describing each "thing to do", for what "targets" (similar to runlevels) that thing is needed, which scripts to run to make that thing happen, and which previous things should have been done before this thing (dependencies). With this, your computer can fire up multiple startup scripts (and stopping scripts) at the same time, only making sure to queue stuff so dependencies are met. For example, you don't need to wait for sshd to start your database server, but you do need networking before you mount shared disks.

That made boot times much better, but at the cost of complexity and maintainability (and here come heated discussions...).

The problem is that not everyone wanted that tradeoff, but systemd was shoved down everyone's throat as most (all?) distros adopted it.

So init freedom is a reaction to that, offering you the option of multiple init systems (there are more than just sysVinit and systemd).

No offense to all the other init systems, but I'd stick with sysV if you're really after simplicity and backwards compatibility with most older systems (and the old ways), or systemd, because it became the de facto standard, it's faster and more modern.

Should you care? If you have to ask this, then no.

If you had to craft your own init scripts and configurations, and had a ton of legacy scripts, or maybe were building very simple barebones systems, or very complex, always changing startup scenarios and targets or runlevels, or want to exercise your "freedom" just for the heck of it, then you could care.

If you're a distro hopper (i.e. are more dedicated to "use Linux" than to use applications which run on Linux), having tried 5 different init systems may be one more thing to brag about in distro hopper meetings.

If you're getting into Linux to learn Linux administration for career purposes, systemd is what you'll find in commercial systems.

If you're after an OS to just be an OS (i.e. just run your programs), just pick a well supported (community) and mainstream one, it will most likely come with systemd, and you'll probably never need to touch systemd. My wife (not technical) has been using exclusively Linux for 15+ years, and I can assure you with 100% certainty that she doesn't know which init system is there, or what is systemd or sysV.

If you're new to Linux, curious and want to learn all you can about it, I'd say there are many other interesting and useful things in Linux to learn and care about before you go down this rabbit hole, summoning some nice nostalgic but outdated tech from the dead.

When you say "login screen" is it graphical or the console?

If it's graphical, can you drop to the console (ctrl+alt+F1 ?) and try to login there? And with a brand new user (create one without the ssd) or root? Just to check if it's something triggered by a user config pointing to the drive.

Also, is your fstab using UUIDs or /dev/sdXn?

After the hang, if you boot without the ssd, can you then find any errors in the message log from the previous boot?

Because I'm not a redneck who only watches and understands news about the weekend chicken fight in his own backyard?

What do you mean with that? Nothing can be compared to the USA? Is USA perfect then? Brazil has universal free healthcare too. It doesn't mean Brazil is better than the USA in every possible aspect. Don't be afraid of comparisons.

So because USA is better than Russia in many things, then free healthcare is bad because Russia has it and the US doesn't?

It's this black&white mentality that creates all stupid polarization of opinions, you know?

Haha, I guess many dog owners just can't see it how it is; probably an addiction to the lopsided unconditional "love". I used to comment something similar back in Reddit, just to see the flood of downvotes and outraged dog owners.

Same reaction to supporting the idea that some breeds are generally more dangerous and/or more aggressive. "Oh, my MY pitbull is a sweetie!!" (adding this here just to test :D )

The article does say free insulin paid by the government. We have that in my country (Brazil), even for foreigners, but my first thought was that in the USA not even citizens get that.

Yes, and I heard as a response "but he LOVES the cage". Really? Why does it need a door with a latch then?

This headline might be confusing for Americans. Free insulin?

Yes, I'm pretty sure they were still dogs. No crippling deformities.

(edit: but if you need to filter "anecdotal" evidence, just add "in the western world, in modern history"?)

Thousands of years ago they were dogs, not fashion accessories.

Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look "cute", and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages ("oh, but my child loves his cage") when they don't need hardwired unconditional lopsided "love" to feed their narcissism.

because as OP made very clear, kbin is the same thing as lemmy, they are just two aliases to the same subreddit.

Ah understood. Kbin is the KDE binary to access this "lemmy" subreddit on facebook?

Spaces are not the end of the world, but very annoying:

On a bash command line, they make it harder to handle a list of files returned by a command as argument to another.

On the command line (lin or win), they require escaping or quoting when used as arguments or script/executable names.

On many programs, if you cut&paste the complete path to the file (for example in a network drive), you can click on the path and it will access the file, but spaces in filenames or directories breaks that (and it's not bad programming, the program simply can't guess where the link ends).

When you mention the name of the file in a documentation or message, it may lead to misintepretation, and it's just fugly:

"You can find more information in the attached document file.pdf".

What is the name of the file? it can be "the attached document file.pdf", "attached document file.pdf", "document file.pdf" or "file.pdf".

Also when mentioned in a text, the file name may end up split in separated lines or even pages, and will more likely be subject to autocorrect.

When copying the file name in a text, in most environments you can double-click to select the whole name, but it doesn't work if it has spaces.

Now, if you never ever type or copy/paste a file name, and only ever access files through a graphical interface, then it makes no difference.

But then you start getting to comfy and if anything goes, why not non-ascii chars too? And that opens a different can of troubles.

Even non-developers may hate spaces in filenames, when links to the file you send in a message don't work because clicking on them uses only up to before the first space.

Basically this. I don't assume that just because it's E2EE (or says it's E2EE) it's privacy safe.

Unless maybe if it's my own system on both sides, running Linux, connected through some FOSS VPN I've set up myself, chatting through nc tunneled through ssh with a 100% silent wired keyboard, no monitor, no network, and everything powered off. Inside an underground lead bunker.

That doesn't mean I don't use Teams, Whatsapp, Gmail, etc. I just don't assume it's private.

E2E just means it's encrypted from end to end, iow, it's not decrypted in the middle of the way.

If I was using an E2E communication application, I, for one wouldn't automatically assume that meant it was not eavesdropping.

Well, if the loophole works, it's not like burning tons and tons of fuel for nothing has any downside or consequences at all, right?

/s