[0xb0565e487]

I have 0 knowledge of systemd-timers. Is it fully interoperable with cron and available on every system that has cron?

If not, I think your comment is pretty irrelevant since there are still scenarios where you'd need to use cron.

[kd913]

It's on every system that has systemd which is basically on every commercial production Linux system.

I can use them as a user and non-root, I get to use journalctl and systemd status to check if it ran. The timers run independently of others and the timers are in English.

If you are using Devuan or something weird like that then sure, but nearly every other way I find systemd-timers better especially for debugability.

[generalizations]

> basically on every commercial production Linux system

That comment rubs me the wrong way. To mirror the sibling, there's a lot outside the Linux+SystemD world - even your firewall probably doesn't use systemd (or linux for that matter, if you're in a professional environment), and neither does Alpine, that runs docker containers. (And love it or hate it, docker is in a lot of commercial production stuff.)

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[ossusermivami]

bu you don't plan to distribute crons to machine that you don't control? why would you care ?

[generalizations]

A) I was responding to the implication that Linux+Systemd is the combination used in 'basically every commercial production system', which discounted the entire world of a) BSD and b) not-systemd. That wasn't a cron-specific comment on my part.

B) I do control my (professional environment) firewall. OpenBSD+PF is an amazing firewall combo, and the other common firewall, pfsense, uses FreeBSD. Neither use Linux; neither use systemd.

[macintux]

There's a vast world outside commercial Linux systems. BSD, macOS, Solaris (I assume Solaris still exists), etc.

And Debian isn't exactly "weird".

[nick__m]

Debian use systemd, Devuan is the reactionary fork of Debian without systemd.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I thought Debian supported system or sysv init; did they remove the latter more recently?

[kafkaIncarnate]

They had about a 5 year "democratic" scream fest that ended when they decided to switch to SystemD (over upstart and other options) starting in Debian Jessie (roughly when I switched off Debian because I couldn't stand the shout matches anymore, not because I had a pony in the race).

https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426

So since April 25th, 2015.

The logic went, we didn't like PulseAudio, therefore we don't like the developer (Lennart Poettering). Lennart Poettering also made SystemD, therefore we automatically hate that. The main complaint was that it relied on DBUS.

Most of them switched to Gentoo because it supported OpenRC, ironically also reliant on DBUS.

EDIT: I found some additional strange results when trying to find the spelling of his name:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/lennart-poetterings-linus-torv...

https://bannedhipster.home.blog/2020/10/28/meet-your-nsa-han...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.misc/c/wnFJ3-QDKdE

Looks like they believe SystemD is an attempt by the NSA to infiltrate and spy on Linux users.

[binarybanana]

>OpenRC, ironically also reliant on DBUS.

Not at all, although if you have any services that use dbus it might get started by one of them. On my system there isn't even a dbus service file that could be used to start dbus directly through OpenRC. OpenRC works fine without any dbus installed, in fact I'm not even sure if it's even used for any functionality at all. Service control is done through a socket in /var/run/openrc/control (or something), at least on any system configuration I've seen.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

That's all unrelated to my point; per your first link:

> The sysvinit init system is still available in "Jessie".

I was asking if this had since changed, since last I'd paid attention you could in fact run Debian without systemd.

[teddyh]

No, sysvinit is still available, but it’s not installed by default.

[macintux]

Ah, thanks, I assumed that was autocorrect madness.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> I assume Solaris still exists

Technically yes, but I expect that Illumos is more relevant