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Ghost
Ghost

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PSA about systemd

Hello everyone,

This is my first post and I hope is a useful one.

For those new to Linux, you may heard about Debian voting on the init system, if you haven't, good for you, you may skip the rest, have a nice day :) .

If you already know what systemd is, you can also can skip the rest and have a nice day too.

How am I doing so far? I already lost 80% of the readers.

I think this post is for the rest of you, you just got your first install or have been blissfuly unaware of all this init system debacle.

TLDR: the whole thing doesn't matter until it does and that will probably be never, so stay blissfuly ignorant of the matter.

For the last 1% of the readers, good for you. Those who are interested in the inner workings of the system have a wonderful journey ahead of you, but beware, there are some unworthy battles out there and I'm afraid this is one of those. These init system discussion lost it's technical value long ago and now is almost a religious one. If you want to learn something about it, avoid all things "Vs" or "best" or "comparisons", just go to the individual descriptions and technical inner workings.

The Linux community can be a wonderfully passionated bunch and as such, can be vicious sometimes, we have to take the bad with the good I guess. So my advice is, don't get involved, these discussion at this point has very little nutritional value.

Have a nice day.

Latest comments (5)

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mr_oysterhead profile image
Tim

Reading this was a real rollercoaster for me.

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ghost profile image
Ghost

really?!, great, .., assuming you like reollercoasters. I just wanted to help someone to avoid waste time in that old tired debate, and instead wasting it on some new and fresh like Svelte Vs the rest, Rust Vs Go or what about if wasm is worth to learn in 2020? :D
altho you can always come back to tabs Vs spaces if you feel nostalgic, just after Home Alone or the Goonies...

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mr_oysterhead profile image
Tim

Lol, all good. I remember when this was first becoming an issue and everyone was up and arms about it. At the time what I wanted was what we all eventually got: consistency. Now, the only depth I go into with debating it is, "well now it's a standard. If you don't like something about it then make the changes and send the improvements upstream."

I'm the spirit of this post, I was gonna post a cheat sheet for tmux and screen but... Immediately a colleague started to debate the merits of "Why even include screen, tmux is everything and better and blah blah blah blah".

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ghost profile image
Ghost

IF I may suggest an alternative that may even be a useful investigation if you haven't tried yet. Something in the lines of "alternative workflows" or "awesome keyword" or "2020, try something new with your Linux Workflow" in there you could show tmux, screen and the general idea of tiling WM, in my case I used first screen years ago and then tmux and I endup ditching both in favor of a tiling WM. They are not the same nor do the same, but the workflow the allow is similar, stop worring about window layout and take maximum profit of your screen realstate. with a tiling WM you win that you get tilinf for everything but you lose the persistent sessions for tty and ssh of screen and tmux and to be able to do this sorcery even without X/Wayland. Also not every program looks well in tiling. There is no better, only the choice.

And the important thing is that is something not known by other OSs (nowdays I think Windows comes with something like tiling, but is stacking first) and not every Linux user have tried.

Tmux/Screen/tiling WM leads to multimonitor systems that today require almost no HW and that to start to love the terminal that people tends to not notice, but is just a written "Alexa", that doesn't spy on you. Is much more awesome when you realize that.

Just a suggestion of mine... :)

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ghost profile image
Ghost

and also, even if screen is worst in every aspect (no idea if is that the case), that facts and why they matter would be important for someone who doesn't know any of them. So not "but..." don't let someone else to discourage you, don't fight it, use it, now you have your colleagues potentially good points to add to your original idea; (s)he didn't hinder your idea, just added new information to put on it! and then some random guy in dev.to gave you even more ideas, now you can take whatever you want from those sources and you have your post, and even if you don't use any of your collegues or my ideas, you final post would be better because you have taken into account more stuff. Open source for you, right there!, good luck, hope to read that post in the future and happy holidays!