[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Man I miss good old GRUB, which I guess is called GRUB legacy now? Most entries only required 4-5 lines of config and there was no ugly shell syntax, a million options, conditionals etc.

Probably just because I grew up with it, but MBR and disk/boot management on Linux was so much simpler back then.

512 bytes of partition table + bootloader(well, the bootstrapping part anyway). Partitions had one simple, 3 character name in /dev. No weird FAT32 partitions full of mysterious files, UEFI stuffed full of unnecessary features, but you can be damn sure a desktop or laptop board is gonna provide all the ones that make your life harder, and none of the actually useful ones.

I'm sure there are lots of good technical reasons why everything needs a UUID now, and so on and so forth, but none of all this complexity solved any problem I actually had in the before times. It just added the problem of now having to read a buttload of documentation every time I even think about touching this stuff.

At some point a few years back, I wanted to switch DNS servers on my laptop running some ubuntu derivative at the time. resolv.conf was still there, so I edited it. Nothing happened. Eventually I ended up finding like 4 different files in various places specifying DNS. And only one was the right one to change. Others might do nothing or actually break DNS.

One of these days I'll probably throw up my hands, put my mobo in legacy mode, and install some bare bones, Systemd free distro. Maybe Crux Linux or Slackware if those even exist still.

[versteegen]

I'm using Slackware-current with manually maintained [edit: actually, I wrote a python script to generate it, see other comment] grub.cfg (grub 2.06) on a MBR system, and happy I don't have GPT. Recently I tried to convert a Windows installation from MBR to GPT. What a disaster, never doing that again (but if you do need to, use gdisk [1]. It's great, I had unrelated issues). I suppose I'll eventually have to convert my Linux PC to GPT when replacing the motherboard. I haven't ever reinstalled Slackware (I just upgrade), since switching to it in 2007. Honestly there are issues with that.

Slackware just celebrated its 30 year anniversary two days ago [2] and still going strong without systemd ;) Well actually it now has eudev, which is the small unintrusive part of systemd which a lot of software these days has as a dependency. Everything is still done with rc files. Best of both worlds.

[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/mbr2gpt.html

[2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/thirty-years-86196804 (There's nothing on the website or announce mailing list)

[DropInIn]

At the risk of sounding silly, the move to systemd and the headaches encountered, such as you describe, are the very reason I left my brand new system which could work well for Linux, including the graphics card, as a single boot windows machine.

It just wasn't worth the headache on top of having to keep windows for work (many programs don't have a Linux option nor do they work properly in wine etc, and vm isn't reasonable for gpu intensive operations like video editing).

IMHO, systemd really messed up the ecosystem and the "Trust" value that Linux in general had built with me.