by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-28 07:47:25+00:00
> The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way.

Incorrect. I used mainstream distro, still had issues, that just solved itself moving to pipewire. Issues like it literally crashing or emitting spur of max volume noise once every few months for no discernable reason.

Pulseaudio also completely denies existence of people trying to do music on Linux, there is no real way to make latency on it be good.

> SystemD is very opinionated, so you'd assume it wouldn't have the same results, but it does.. if you use a popular distro then they've done a lot of the hard work that makes systemd function smooth.

Over the years of using the "opinion" of SystemD seems to be "if it is not problem on Lennart's laptop, it's not a real problem and it can be closed or ignored completely".

For example systemd have no real method to tell it "turn off all apps after 5 minutes regardless of what silly package maintainers think". Now what happens if you have a server on UPS that have say 5 minutes of battery and one of the apps have some problem and doesn't want to close?

In SysV, it gets killed, and system gets remounted read only. You have app crash recovery but at least your filesystem is clean
In systemd ? No option to do that. You can set default timeout but it can be override in each service so you'd have to audit every single package and tune it to achieve that. That was one bug that was closed.

Same problem also surfaced if you have say app with a bug that prevented it from closing from sigterm and you wanted to reboot a machine. Completely stuck

But wait, there is another method, systemd have an override, you can press (IIRC) ctrl+alt+delete 7 times within 2 seconds to force it to restart ( which already confuses some people that expect it to just restart machine clean(ish) regardless https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11285 ).

...which is also impossible if your only method of access is software KVM where you need to navigate to menu to send ctrl+alt+del. So I made ticket with proposal to just make it configurable timeout for the CAD ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/29616 ), the ticket wasn't even read completely because Mr. Poettering said "this is not actionable, give a proposal", so I pasted the thing he decided to ignore in original ticket, and got ignored. Not even "pull requests welcome" (which I'd be fine with, I just wanted confirmation that the feature like that won't be rejected if I start writing it).

There is also issue of journald disk format being utter piece of garbage ("go thru entire journal just to get app's last few lines bad", hundreds of disk reads on simple systemctl status <appname> bad) that is consistently ignored thru many tickets from different people.

Or the issue that resolvconf replacement in systemd will just roll a dice on DNS ordering, but hey, Mr. Lennart doesn't use openvpn so it's not real issue ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/27543 )

I'm not writing it to shit on systemd and praise what was before, as a piece of software it's very useful for my job as sysadmin (we literally took tens of thousands lines of fixed init scripts out because all of the features could be achieved in unit files) and I mean "saved tons of time and few demons running" in some cases, but Mr. Poettering is showing same ignorant "I know better" attitude he got scolded at by kernel maintainers.