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by oconnor663 2409 days ago
Not rare. The majority of Linux distros have switched to systemd because the majority of people who work with it like it better than what they were using before. It's just that no one ever made it to the front page of HN writing a blog post titled "This technology is generally decent."
1 comments
wibble10 2409 days ago
I dunno about that, the majority of ops guys I work with (or have worked with over the last few years) dislike it... we’re mostly angry old greybeards though.
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bashinator 2409 days ago
Greybeard here - I like systemd well enough. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than rando SYSV init scripts. Journald and journalctl are loads better than /var/log.
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wibble10 2408 days ago
Have you used openbsd for anything lately? Systemd is better than the horrible mess of upstart/sysv etc, although the one linux laptop I run is using void (and thus, runit) and you can type init 6 and it doesn’t randomly hang for 2 minutes while shutting down if you’re not using gnome/kde.. imagine! The future is here ;)
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bashinator 2408 days ago
It's been a number of years - doesn't openbsd use just plain /etc/rc and /etc/rc.conf? I like that better than init.d just because it enforces some standards around the scripting at least.

I admin a number of ubuntu servers running systemd, and they all shut down/reboot pretty much instantaneously.

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pmoriarty 2408 days ago
I have to give a second endorsement to runit. I really wish more distros would use it.
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wibble10 2408 days ago
Why are they loads better btw? I think in composable commands, being able to cat my logs without first setting them up to pipe to a syslog is something I very much want...
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bashinator 2408 days ago
Being able to view logs based on the name of the service instead of the name of the logfile. `journalctl -u <unit>` vs `less /var/log/service/something.log`

Being able to specify date ranges instead of grepping around multiple files. `journalctl -u <unit> -s <start> -e <end>` instead of horrid combinations of grep and gzcat.

"Okay," you say, "but that's all for logs on the host. Shouldn't you be using Splunk or an ELK stack?"

Journalctl can export logs in a json format that can be natively consumed by splunk for free metadata markup. I wrote some container sidecars to do exactly that, and it worked great.

The only thing I don't like about journalctl is that it doesn't line wrap by default.

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