Yet another Hacker News

Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks

18 points Bluestein 2 hours ago 16 comments

jauntywundrkind 57 minutes ago | parent

This is just the homepage. Bah. I was hopeful this might be more! I would genuinely love for some posting on systemd that can actually talk to this.

There's posts on using systemd for this or that, which are fine, but it feels like the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally, to express ths vision, where-as the anti-vision (as ever) sells itself, is a magnet that makes common party out of all dissent.

graemep 52 minutes ago | parent

The vision is controversial so a lot of advocates find it easier to promote as an init system.

It tends to be the anti-systemd people who keep saying its not just an init system.

McGlockenshire 51 minutes ago | parent

Yeah this is just a link to the branding page. I do appreciate the discussion of "system 500" at the bottom.

But if you yank out the "brand" from the URL you'll get the actual site.

jauntywundrkind 30 minutes ago | parent

Sure. These sites are fine rallying points, absolutely.

But they are also very old, and there's very few efforts I've seen to pitch and promote systemd. It's found and enjoyed by a lot of people (particularly those who had to deal with the tangled haphazard sprawl of cobbled together systems from the before times), it makes nicely visible what is happening on the system, integrates cgroups and good least capabilities practices.

But it feels to me like there ought be more ongoing and vocal celebration of this, enjoyment of this. More rallying points that trumpet the wins, that page people in to how nicely this helps. I want to see more positive tech advocacy, is what I'm saying. This is a fine site, yes, with lots of discussion. I've enjoyed decades of Lennart blog posts too. But I wish there was more. I wish this submission was a blog post of the same title. A fresh take, a fresh spin, on such a worthy-of-treatment topic.

mxuribe 49 minutes ago | parent

@jauntywundrkind I was about reply...but then @McGlockenshire said it best! Cut off the subdomain, and you'll get more info. ;-)

Bluestein 38 minutes ago | parent

- https://systemd.io/ is full of documentation.-

wmf 27 minutes ago | parent

Every now and then there's a blog post or presentation that combines several systemd features to show how the result is a better overall system. The All Systems Go conference https://all-systems-go.io/ is a good place to learn about systemd.

nomel 19 minutes ago | parent

> pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally

I'm not aware of this sort of parading in open source software. Do you have a past example? I see it as competent people using things that they want to use, with the "better" being preferred, for whatever reasons (including momentum). "Advocating" for an init system seems like something that should be entirely and completely by merit, with maintainability, debugability, and fragility probably being the top metrics for most systems, speed being important for anything with a human sitting in front of it.

akerl_ 9 minutes ago | parent

Given that the overwhelming majority of Linux distros have moved to systemd, it's not clear why the pro-systemd camp would need to be finding or making opportunities to rally.

They're spending their time build and improving systemd's set of building blocks.

ares623 8 minutes ago | parent

Do they need to? As an outsider, my view is that they already "won".

mxuribe 50 minutes ago | parent

This should be renamed to "Branding about..."...Because that seems to be the focus on this destination webpage...and not content specific to the underlying tech of systemd.

0xbadcafebee 24 minutes ago | parent

"Building blocks" makes it sound like things you can use to build other things. In reality it's more of an octopus, or a fungus.

seany 19 minutes ago | parent

We had reasonable building blocks before systemd...