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[–] 51 points 3 months ago (6 children)

It's like that very very old joke...

Geek: "So then I brought the girl home..."
Excited crowd: "and then?"
Geek: "then I pushed the keyboard and sat her on my desk..."
Excited crowd: "woah, you have a PC? What processor do you have? Do you overclock? What cooling do you use?"

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  • [–] 45 points 3 months ago

    I like systemd because my distro came with it and my computer boots.

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  • [–] 63 points 3 months ago (12 children)

    There's legitimate criticism of systemd and I do understand that people can hate it.

    Anyways, systemd is so nice to use. Even more with nixos.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I'm trying to use alpine Linux on a VM. The amount of things depending on systemd is extreme. It's a pain in the ass not having it.

    Orr... I'm shitty at Linux.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    it's not just you. it's either systemd or no GNOME or KDE (technically possible if working around bugs is your 9-5).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I've been running KDE on Alpine since Alpine v3.20 and I haven't had any issues with it that I haven't had on, say, Debian. If I'm not mistaken all components of KDE that depend on systemd are replaceable by standalone projects.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    A lot of people suddenly talking about NixOS lately but literally the only news I've seen about it in a while was that the maintainers are Slopping with AI Code.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Is there an article on this I can read? I was about to start looking into trying Nix and that’s kinda disappointing to hear

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    I might be exaggerating based on the little I've seen, particularly this post LINK which has a very misleading title, but the number of packages for AI integration to NixOS and forks for Agentic OS and workflows, the amount of support (real or otherwise) for AI in the NixOS communities, and articles like this one: LINK, would be a hard sell to tell me were all coincidence.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    Thanks for the link. Might put me off Nix a bit. I may look into comparing some of the other immutable distros like Fedora’s. Idk I avoided them early on, but I’ve had to spend a lot of time fixing shit lately and was considering a change.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    Have you tried CachyOS? It's built on Arch but it's a lot easier to get into, let's you pick a desktop environment such as KDE Plasma or GNOME in the installation, the install media itself is a portable OS.

    Definitely good to keep an open mind while you shop around for your next distro.

    Recently there was a hacker issue with the AUR repos, but most of the packages you need are likely already on the official CachyOS package search without requiring an AUR package.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    I’m actually on CachyOS now. I’ve got a list of stuff I need to fix with it unfortunately. Namely issues with monitors, and some finicky stuff with USB devices that I’ve got to unplug after every wake on sleep, plus a handful of other items I don’t notice as often.

    But it does work, so I haven’t been too unhappy with it. It’s just the time to fix things that bugs me sometimes.

    Debating reinstalling again since there’s been some major changes like ditching Octopi and Cachy Package manager for Shelly. Plus I’ve kinda wanted something different from KDE and now that they’ve got Noctalia in the default installer it seemed appealing.

    Lol I’m not one for doing updates too frequently so I did miss the AUR issue. I saw the news, but hadn’t updated so I was in the clear

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    NGL I haven't had much experience with the package managers because I've been installing everything with the konsole via pacman -S and flatpak install flathub commands or manually if needed. I'm surprised to hear about the USB devices issue, even my analogue audio interface worked plug and play and I've never had to reseat them.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 months ago

    I can count on one hand the number of times I used Octopi so it’s not a big loss. But I heard good things about Shelly so I was thinking of giving it a whirl.

    The USB thing, man, my microphone and my wireless receiver for my controller, both those damn things have to be unplugged on wake every time before they work. Couldn’t find any bios settings related to it as I thought it could be a power setting, but I’ve come up short. Plus (i think it’s) X Window Manager won’t recognize my actual primary monitor as my primary monitor and instead chooses to default to my 90 degree rotated monitor until log in. Never mind what KDE says is primary or the file for XWM says…

    There’s some other small gripes, but I’ve just been living with it for the time being.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Systemd and Wayland have become ragebait for some people.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Systemd is stable and can get the job done, I don't love how it does it, but I accept that it's a reasonable choice.

    Something need/s/ed to replace X11. The fact that I still can't autohotkey in Wayland is fucking insane. 9/10 of my current issues in Linux are Wayland-related. We're being corralled into wayland as distros drop X11 and I don't have time to keep chasing that fox.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Wayland enforces security to stop one process sniffing or injecting input into another. X11 basically has zero security boundaries. So certain things are easier in X11, but then again the price to pay is too much.

    So things like virtual mouse positioning, autohotkey, screen capture are harder to do but not insurmountable. It requires protocols that the client / desktop understand and which are fit for purpose. Big desktops like GNOME & KDE Plasma do support xdg-desktop-portal which allows hotkeys to be registered with the desktop, and could potentially be what you need.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    I need mouse and keyboard control to do testing automation.

    I want keyboard interception so i can make dozens of !faxnumber, !address, !bashloop, !bashwhile macros to use text replacement on

    You can do this in every other OS. It wasn't even a primary exploit, just something some devs decided to die on a hill over.

    Wayland has been reasonably used for a decade, at what point would you consider unreasonbly difficult to transition into insurmountable

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Stuff like ydotool, wtype exist and presumably there are others for this. Search on automation testing on Wayland and see.

    Since it is a niche I'm not surprised if it wasn't a critical path for Wayland adoption but clearly there are solutions that work for certain compositors and I assume people working on a more robust solution. But allowing one piece of software to sniff or inject input, or capture its content is an obvious security flaw and Wayland devs are right to put it front and centre. If a desktop is to allow those things then it should be through a security model instead of in the absence of one.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    I have ydotool, it is unable to do anything but put the mouse at 0,0

    I have tried every product, got all the way into python before I was able to even do relative.

    edit: just tried again because it's been a while. The best I can do with ydotool is move the mouse cursor to -99999,-99999 to get it ot go to 0,0 then go to 100,100. It is, to this day, unable to to an absolute position, but is able to do relative.

    I just tried espanso too, doesn't work in kate or konsole, or web browsers.

    I'm running in to the same stuff i've been running into for 3 years, none of the apps that are intended to do this actually do it in Wayland.

    I just want to be able to use mouse automation and test replacement, i don't think that's a big ask.

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  • [–] 136 points 3 months ago (72 children)

    Of all the people who have incredibly strong opinions about not-so-incredibly important things, the virulently anti-systemd crowd are among the ones that baffle me the most.

    πŸ’― 4
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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    The real problem with systemd is figuring out what's is or isn't part of systemd...

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    That's easy: If it's a service reasonably expected to be present on most desktop systems, it's part of systemd or will eventually be.

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  • [–] 76 points 3 months ago* (52 children)

    There are many legitimate complaints. Bundling a bunch of services into a single binary goes completely against Unix philosophy. Systemd changing from text to binary logs is my pet peeve.

    Copying how Windows does things isn't necessarily the best.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago

    I was annoyed with binary logs until I found cases where compressing logs was literally 10x or more improvement, like if you ran into a bug that just repeatedly spit the same log.

    And I know logrotate compresses text logs too but if you're going to compress logs into tar.gz, might as well just make it binary by default and have a nice interface (journald) on top

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  • [–] 36 points 3 months ago

    You know it's not a single binary, right ? Systemd is a bunch of different, mostly single usage, mostly optional, binaries. As far as Unix philosophy goes, Systemd is definitely following the principles, which is not the case for the Kernel for instance.

    As for the binary logs, I used to hate it, but then, not having to manually parse logs for filtering is really nice.

    I do have my issues with Systemd, but it not following the Unix philosophy is not one of them.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 months ago (16 children)

    Richard P. Gabriel, in his essay β€œThe Rise of Worse-is-Better,” expounds on this theme (see Appendix A). His thesis is that the Unix design philosophy requires that all design decisions err on the side of implementation simplicity, and not on the side of correctness, consistency, or completeness. He calls this the β€œWorse Is Better” philosophy and shows how it yields programs that are technically inferior to programs designed where correctness and consistency are paramount, but that are evolutionarily superior because they port more easily. Just like a virus.

    The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command that does precisely one function, and does it well (...) This philosophy, in the hands of amateurs, leads to inexplicably mind-numbing botches like the existence of two programs, β€œhead” and β€œtail,” which print the first part or the last part of a file, depending. Even though their operations are duals of one another, β€œhead” and β€œtail” are different programs, written by different authors, and take different options!

    From The Unix Hater's Handbook

    (I like Linux, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows)

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    That head/tail thing is kind of a goofy argument. For one thing they aren't duals; tail is naturally more complex because the end of a file often changes and the application can optionally keep showing you the new output. Also, the fact that they're separate applications in the first place is arguably better than the a one-application approach, which would always require a command line switch to select between outputting the start or end of a file. And finally, while I guess this could vary between implementations of head and tail, mine has identical switches for all the common options.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    They could have been two commands that call a single parent command with different options. For example, imagine if cat had an option -N to restrict the number of lines that was printed, and also an option -t to start from the end. head would just proxy to cat -N and tail would proxy to cat -N -t. Combining the three into a single implementation reduces total LoC and opportunity for bugs. Also reduces total maintenance burden.

    I believe busybox is like this actually - a ton of Unix commands in a single package. It's used by Alpine Linux, a tiny and performance linux distro commonly used by docker containers.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Busybox is literally just a bundle. That's its whole purpose. It doesn't reimplement anything.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago*

    Some quick research says that it is indeed a re-implementation. The first line of the wikipedia, says:

    BusyBox is an implementation of many Unix commands in a single executable file.

    You can download the source code yourself to verify. And if you've actually used Alpine Linux before you would have also noticed that the commands provided by busybox have only a subset of the options provided by their GNU coreutils counterparts.

    Please do your research before so confidently correcting other people.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    I initially agreed with your take there but I actually think they're a great argument for their point. head and tail are the exact same abstraction. Their implementations will be quite different, but they both serve "provided this data, give me these lines". Consider instead that these are simply operations on arrays and actually they map perfectly to Python slices: data[:10] and data[-10:]. This abstraction mapping also shows that, imo, the tool should provide data[n:m] and it would still be entirely consistent with the Unix philosophy. In fact, this tool exists in the Unix toolkit: sed -n n,mp. Three tools then are currently required for the simple concept of "slice lines". I also think it's a bit of a mess. You could replace head with sed fairly easily: sed -n '1,10p' but not tail (it is possible, but quite slow and very opaque)

    As an aside I actually found this quite frustrating myself because I don't like reaching for sed in the n:m case (I always forget and end up piping head to tail) and ended up writing my own tool for essentially this style of slicing input, also replacing probably my least favorite use of my least favorite Unix tool, dd, to slice arbitrary byte sequences. The tool doesn't feel overloaded and I use it quite often.

    (I'm sure many people have written this same tool. There is probably a widely known open source option that I've just never come across)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    The head and tail programs also do completely different things. What differences in options do they have?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    Really completely different? Do they not print first / last lines of text from a file into the terminal?

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    The way they do it is fundamentally different. Head just reads until number of newlines is the target number. Tail has to first read the entire file and keep a buffer of the file and/or offsets for each line ending to determine what the last 10 (or so) lines are.

    This idiot (Gabriel) probably thinks exclusively in the real world paper line analog.

    I also just looked at each program's command line options and they're identical. Less things only Tail can do (because they're fundamentally different operations)

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    This idiot (Gabriel) probably thinks exclusively in the real world paper line analog.

    Typical of Internet discourse to just immediately brand someone you disagree with an idiot... That "idiot" is one of the designers of common lisp, among other things. You're allowed to disagree with a smart person too you know

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    OK. Designers of programming languages can be idiots.

    Lisp is a bad language IMO. Way too mathy. Nobody programs like that anymore for a reason.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    "This program sucks because it doesn't come with the world's most confusing GUI and doesn't do a trillion things"

    If you ask this person what "technically inferior" actually means you'd probably get a different answer every day.

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  • [–] 51 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    It's not people disliking it that makes no sense to me; everyone has their opinions.

    I just can't imagine having the level of anger displayed by some of the most vocal of the anti-systemd crowd.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    If your favorite thing is being ruined and you can't stop it, I can understand frustration being displayed as anger.

    It's the same when Windows users get angry at things like OneDrive. It's forced on them and they don't want to have to work around removing it like people having to work around how Gnome is integrated into systemd.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    If your favorite thing is being ruined and you can't stop it, I can understand frustration being displayed as anger.

    That's the joy of open source though: you can stop it. You are free to use another init system, fork projects, etc. With Windows, you can't do any of that. Since it's closed source, workarounds that may be temporary are all you can do.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    That's the joy of open source though: you can stop it.

    Not really. Unless you are prepared to devote your life to changing the source code to what you want, you have to accept it. And because you forked you are no longer downstream and will have to spend the rest of your life keeping up with patches.

    It's not much different than Windows. You could write a OneDrive uninstaller but you will have to spend the rest of your life with patches every time MS updates and breaks your uninstaller.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I mean we are literally on a couple of open source solutions communicating using an open protocol probably using some sort of open OS.

    https://nosystemd.org/ is a thing. I dont have particularly strong opinions on the matter.

    You don't need to do it alone. In fact, people can come by, fix some things, then go about life. Or donate money instead of resources. If you have used lemmy/piefed/mastodon/peertube in the past, theres a tiny bit of my code in there that makes things just a tiny bit better. Thats not a brag or anything, its just that multiple people can contribute.

    But I hear the frustrations. There is a certain mindset you have to have, hopeful you and others can build something....or with enough hatred to build out of spite. Sometimes thats hard to do with everything else in life. Sometimes the best thing to do is to accept and move on. Or go looking for new solutions without maintenance.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    That's the joy of open source though: you can stop it. You are free to use another init system, fork projects

    That and a big company looking to manufacture a perceived advantage by aggreasively pushing their shit into the mainstream - good fit to be taken over by IBM - who can bankroll the slapdash dev and bully ISVs, and you're set.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    your favorite thing is being ruined and you can't stop it,

    Hardly a 'favourite thing'; it's like making a water slide out of a river : Wantonly wrecking something simple, effective and usable for this mishmash isn't ruining something sacred as much as it is destroying something for no reason to dramatically create something lesser the world didn't need. Except with more hype, payola, ageism, strong-arm adoption and cult worship.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    There's also a few cases of feature and scope creep, including the infamous systemd-resolved.
    Systemd, your job is to launch services, manage logs, and do timers and relaunches on a service crash. DNS is out of scope, leave that to existing services.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    You've misunderstood something.
    systemd-resolved is one of the services that uses systemd's service management system
    You're saying "don't use this service management system to manage your services"

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I agree, though my biggest headache has been with systemd handling mounts. You have to modify a ton of units to add After and Required to make sure the NFS shares you have in fstab get mounted before starting services that depend on them. And then if the package maintainer updates their unit files, all your changes disappear!

    Such a huge headache compared to the classic init.d that mounted everything very early -- with just the occasional "boot delayed a couple seconds because your share was offline" or such.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    What systemd binary is the worst offender, in your opinion?

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It's not the binary. It's that the logs it writes are in binary so can't be read without a program.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    Even systems that use text logs, compress logs using logrotate and you have to uncompress before you can read them. Also since the compressed tar.gz logs are a bunch of separate files, if you don't have an exact date of what you're looking for, you have to uncompress and search through all of them. I much prefer just using journalctl

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    The other day on a thread here about "people who use other init systems, why?" and i wrote about my experience with systemd and git downvoted for mysterious reasons. Other people that did the same as me also got their downvote sixpacks. And now they want to make it seem like it's just the people that hate systemd the annoying ones...

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    There are too many people who use downvote to disagree with cogent and well written points.

    I try to only downvote if something is obviously trolling, in bad taste, or wildly stupid.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Hey, just wanted to let you know that I downvoted your comment. Mainly because I think it's funny when people can't come up with compelling arguments and complain about being downvoted instead, but also because I'm part of the conspiracy making sure that people vocally complaining about systemd seem really annoying and wrong.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    I don't particularly hate systemd, but when they said they are considering incorporating age verification stuff I switched to void.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 months ago* (10 children)

    Good news is that systemd is not incorporating age verification just like they are not incorporating name verification.

    Both name and birth date are just userdb fields with no verification at all.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 months ago (9 children)
  • [+] 1 point 3 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    No. A database doesn't have these specific fields by default.

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  • [+] 4 points 3 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    This field appeared in LDAP for different reasons, than age control.

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  • [+] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)
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