5 ms·

I only use debian pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset with pipewire, I've never had to eve

by blibble 8mo ago

I only use debian pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset with pipewire, I've never had to even touch it systemd: yesterday I had a network service on one machine not start up because the IP it was trying to bind to wasn't available yet the dependencies for the .service file didn't/can't express the networking semantics correctly this isn't some hacked up .service file I made, it's that from an extremely popular package from a very popular distro (yeah I know, use a socket activated service......... more tight coupling to the garbage software) the day before that I had a service fail to start because the wall clock was shifted by systemd-timesyncd during startup, and then the startup timeout fired because the clock advanced more than the timeout then the week before that I had a load of stuff start before the time was synced, because chrony has some weird interactions with time-sync.target it's literally a new random problem every other boot because of this non-deterministic startup, which was never a problem with traditional init or /etc/rc for what? to save maybe a second of boot time if the distro maintainers don't understand the systemd dependency model after a decade then it's unfit for purpose

jacquesm 8mo ago
I can totally relate to this, it's gotten to the point that I'm just as scared of rebooting my Linux boxes as I was of rebooting my windows machine a couple of decades ago. And quite probably more scared.
- blibble 8mo ago
  everyone attacking Microslop for a bug where Windows won't shut down properly well, systemd's got them beat there!
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    The good thing about systemd or any other Linux software is that you don't have to use it, until this company gets off the ground.
    - jacquesm 8mo ago
      I think at some point we will see a steep increase in value of old hardware that can still run unsigned binaries.
      - direwolf20 8mo ago
        It won't be able to interact with any online services like Google or Hacker News.
        jacquesm 8mo ago
        Google I can live without ;)
        rsync 8mo ago
        You will always be able to interact with rsync.net … … and the warrant canary we publish every Monday morning.
        herewulf 8mo ago
        Ah, we will get more done. Or maybe just see you on the mailing list and IRC?!
- esseph 8mo ago
  What distro?
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    The box that I'm worried about in particular is running RedHat. Ubuntu boxes: usually ok as long as you stay away from anything python related in the core system.
jorvi 8mo ago
> it's literally a new random problem every other boot because of this non-deterministic startup, which was never a problem with traditional init or /etc/rc This gave me a good chuckle. Systemd literally was created to solve the awful race conditions and non-determinism in other init systems. And it has done a tremendous job at it. Hence the litany of options to ensure correct order and execution: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.service.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... And outside of esoteric setups I haven't ever encountered the problems you mentioned with service files.
- blibble 8mo ago
  yeah, many options that are complicated beyond the understanding of the distro maintainers, and yet still don't allow expression of common semantics required to support network services reliably like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced" and it's not esoteric, even ListenAddress with sshd doesn't even work reliably the ONLY piece of systemd I've not had problems with is systemd-boot, and then it turned out they didn't write that
  - jorvi 8mo ago
    > like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced" "network-online.target is a target that actively waits until the network is “up”, where the definition of “up” is defined by the network management software. Usually it indicates a configured, routable IP address of some kind. Its primary purpose is to actively delay activation of services until the network has been set up." For time sync checks, I assume one of the targets available will effectively mean a time sync has happened. Or you can do something with ExecStartPre. You could run a shell command that checks for the most recent time sync or forces one.
    - bandrami 8mo ago
      Sysadmins really hate the word "usually", and that is at the root of just about every systemd headache I've had
    - 8mo ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
"for what? to save a second of boot time" Doubtful the motivation was /etc/rc being too slow daemontools, runit, s6 solve that problem
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  The only parties that really cared about boot time were the big hosting providers and container schleppers. For desktop linux it never mattered as much.
bee_rider 8mo ago
PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons! IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directly (memory hazy, it was a while ago). It could be a bit of a pain.
- fao_ 8mo ago
  I remember ALSA. Sure, it was finnicky to use `alsamixer` to unmute the master channels now and then, but I personally never had any trouble with it.
  - sam_lowry_ 8mo ago
    Alsa with dmix is my current setup on ArchLinux.
  - account42 8mo ago
    I still need to use alsamixer to unmute my headphones after accidentally unplugging them and plugging them in again fails to do so. That's with PipeWire - never had that problem with just ALSA.
    - fao_ 8mo ago
      Eh, I had to do that with pulseaudio too, but constantly, across all distros and headphones. Pipewire is shonky, I have to restart now and then on my steam deck (I'm using it as a desktop), but it's still much better than pulseaudio. Even ALSA was better than pulseaudio lol
      - ahartmetz 8mo ago
        For most of the (sadly not shorter) life of PulseAudio, ALSA was more reliable, but at some point, Firefox got a new audio backend that straight up dropped support for ALSA, and a few games started crashing with backtraces indicating audio trouble when not run with PulseAudio. I've had to deal with PulseAudio's dropouts under load, latencies and lockups for 2-3 years before PipeWire became a viable replacement.
esseph 8mo ago
Debian is a darling for which I will always love, but it's inability to deal with systemd is one of the prime reasons I left. I am not seeing these kind of systemd issues with Fedora / RHEL. It just works
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  That's because systemd originated at RedHat. If it had been designed distribution agnostic it would have worked a lot better on other distros besides RH.
  - NekkoDroid 8mo ago
    What are the non-distribution agnostic parts of systemd? Considering it runs as PID1 (usually) it kinda is the base of distros and not really built on top of any distro other than "the linux kernel".
braincat31415 8mo ago
For me, randomly missing NFS mounts after boot were the last straw. I could not solve this problem. I am back on sysv init.
- smm11 8mo ago
  This. If you set an NFS share, it better be there forever and ever.

by blibble 8mo ago

jacquesm 8mo ago

I can totally relate to this, it's gotten to the point that I'm just as scared of rebooting my Linux boxes as I was of rebooting my windows machine a couple of decades ago. And quite probably more scared.

blibble 8mo ago
everyone attacking Microslop for a bug where Windows won't shut down properly well, systemd's got them beat there!
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  The good thing about systemd or any other Linux software is that you don't have to use it, until this company gets off the ground.
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    I think at some point we will see a steep increase in value of old hardware that can still run unsigned binaries.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      It won't be able to interact with any online services like Google or Hacker News.
      - jacquesm 8mo ago
        Google I can live without ;)
      - rsync 8mo ago
        You will always be able to interact with rsync.net … … and the warrant canary we publish every Monday morning.
      - herewulf 8mo ago
        Ah, we will get more done. Or maybe just see you on the mailing list and IRC?!
esseph 8mo ago
What distro?
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  The box that I'm worried about in particular is running RedHat. Ubuntu boxes: usually ok as long as you stay away from anything python related in the core system.

jorvi 8mo ago

> it's literally a new random problem every other boot because of this non-deterministic startup, which was never a problem with traditional init or /etc/rc This gave me a good chuckle. Systemd literally was created to solve the awful race conditions and non-determinism in other init systems. And it has done a tremendous job at it. Hence the litany of options to ensure correct order and execution: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.service.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... And outside of esoteric setups I haven't ever encountered the problems you mentioned with service files.

blibble 8mo ago
yeah, many options that are complicated beyond the understanding of the distro maintainers, and yet still don't allow expression of common semantics required to support network services reliably like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced" and it's not esoteric, even ListenAddress with sshd doesn't even work reliably the ONLY piece of systemd I've not had problems with is systemd-boot, and then it turned out they didn't write that
- jorvi 8mo ago
  > like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced" "network-online.target is a target that actively waits until the network is “up”, where the definition of “up” is defined by the network management software. Usually it indicates a configured, routable IP address of some kind. Its primary purpose is to actively delay activation of services until the network has been set up." For time sync checks, I assume one of the targets available will effectively mean a time sync has happened. Or you can do something with ExecStartPre. You could run a shell command that checks for the most recent time sync or forces one.
  - bandrami 8mo ago
    Sysadmins really hate the word "usually", and that is at the root of just about every systemd headache I've had
  - 8mo ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago

"for what? to save a second of boot time" Doubtful the motivation was /etc/rc being too slow daemontools, runit, s6 solve that problem

jacquesm 8mo ago
The only parties that really cared about boot time were the big hosting providers and container schleppers. For desktop linux it never mattered as much.

bee_rider 8mo ago

PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons! IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directly (memory hazy, it was a while ago). It could be a bit of a pain.

fao_ 8mo ago
I remember ALSA. Sure, it was finnicky to use `alsamixer` to unmute the master channels now and then, but I personally never had any trouble with it.
- sam_lowry_ 8mo ago
  Alsa with dmix is my current setup on ArchLinux.
- account42 8mo ago
  I still need to use alsamixer to unmute my headphones after accidentally unplugging them and plugging them in again fails to do so. That's with PipeWire - never had that problem with just ALSA.
  - fao_ 8mo ago
    Eh, I had to do that with pulseaudio too, but constantly, across all distros and headphones. Pipewire is shonky, I have to restart now and then on my steam deck (I'm using it as a desktop), but it's still much better than pulseaudio. Even ALSA was better than pulseaudio lol
    - ahartmetz 8mo ago
      For most of the (sadly not shorter) life of PulseAudio, ALSA was more reliable, but at some point, Firefox got a new audio backend that straight up dropped support for ALSA, and a few games started crashing with backtraces indicating audio trouble when not run with PulseAudio. I've had to deal with PulseAudio's dropouts under load, latencies and lockups for 2-3 years before PipeWire became a viable replacement.

esseph 8mo ago

Debian is a darling for which I will always love, but it's inability to deal with systemd is one of the prime reasons I left. I am not seeing these kind of systemd issues with Fedora / RHEL. It just works

jacquesm 8mo ago
That's because systemd originated at RedHat. If it had been designed distribution agnostic it would have worked a lot better on other distros besides RH.
- NekkoDroid 8mo ago
  What are the non-distribution agnostic parts of systemd? Considering it runs as PID1 (usually) it kinda is the base of distros and not really built on top of any distro other than "the linux kernel".

braincat31415 8mo ago

For me, randomly missing NFS mounts after boot were the last straw. I could not solve this problem. I am back on sysv init.

smm11 8mo ago
This. If you set an NFS share, it better be there forever and ever.