[mschuster91]

> But now obviously we were so blind and wrong all this time and the only true solution is of course systemd.

Come on, dude. That's unnecessarily polemic.

cron et al have served us for decades, yes. But that doesn't mean that cron is the solution that needs to accompany us until the heat death of the universe or year 2038, whatever comes first.

I agree, the systemd folks haven't exactly been the best when it comes to PR or when it comes to being even near feature parity with what they tried to replace. But now, they aren't just at feature parity, they surpassed plain old cron.

Maybe it is time to lay cron to rest, at least slowly.

[egorfine]

> that doesn't mean that cron is the solution that needs to accompany us until the heat

Yeah I agree.

> systemd folks haven't exactly been the best when it comes to PR

It's deeper than that. Systemd folks are enemies of Linux. First, it's "fuck your opinion, do as we say" attitude which makes me want to throw away everything that comes from that poisonous well. Second, it's the embrace and extinguish strategy employed by the systemd project. And third, systemd author is up to no good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

[mschuster91]

> First, it's "fuck your opinion, do as we say" attitude which makes me want to throw away everything that comes from that poisonous well.

On the other hand, it is a consistently heard argument when debating why the year of the Linux adoption on desktop hasn't happened yet is that there are too many standards, too many cooks. And I kinda agree with that, packaging software for multiple distributions is a hot mess, especially if you're shipping daemons. systemd is at least one worry less, it's a stable API that can be used for all purposes.

> And third, systemd author is up to no good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

Again, this isn't as black-and-white as it seems on a cursory review.

From the perspective of someone who hates anti-rooting measures on phones, anything moving into the direction of trusted computing is bad.

But from the perspective of someone, say, in Russia, Iran, the US or Germany who might be a journalist or political activist? Suddenly, a way for the OS to attest if the hardware hasn't been manipulated in an evil maid scenario and that any successful attempt of exploiting an OS vulnerability at runtime can be reverted by a simple reboot becomes extremely vulnerable.

My personal opinion, we need strong and good attestation capabilities for a multitude of use cases. But we also need good laws that protect user freedoms, similar to "right to repair" laws we need "right to root" laws that ban applications from requiring unrooted phones.

[egorfine]

systemd-as-pid1 is good. I have to admit that. I will not go back to syvinit unless a good reason comes up.

However absolutely fuck all the metastasis surrounding systemd and the shit inside, timers included.

> we need strong and good

Yeah this is true.

Problem is, this technology will absolutely be used for limiting your access to the internet from a distribution that was modified. Thus leading to locked down personal computers.

[mschuster91]

> However absolutely fuck all the metastasis surrounding systemd and the shit inside, timers included.

Meh. systemctl list-timers is orders of magnitude better than trying to wade through /etc/crontab, /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,monthly,weekly,yearly} and whatever else non-Debian distributions come up with, and cron's arcane syntax is a mess on its own on top of that. Especially if you try to run a cronjob as not-root.

> Problem is, this technology will absolutely be used for limiting your access to the internet from a distribution that was modified. Thus leading to locked down personal computers.

That's a hypothetical threat IMHO. DRM and Cloudflare Turnstile [1] are actual threats that are far bigger in practical usage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345840