Things like this are why I don’t put systemd on my machines. It’s too complicated for me. Too many things going on. I’ve moved away from mac os to linux specifically to avoid weird over-engineered solutions, I want to be able to understand my system, not just use it!
EDIT:
SystemD/Linux
We’re not there yet with systemd, but I would argue that Alpine Linux qualifies as “busybox/Linux” lol. It’s literally just the kernel, busybox, openrc, and a package manager stapled together. It’s so minimalist that it barely even exists! I love that distro so much!
Honestly, the only reason I’m not using a non-SystemD distro is this is my first time actually going all in and having larger communities to help with issues plus just trying to force myself to learn it since it seems like it’s not going away
But yeah, I’m not a fan.
Working through a networking issue right now and the layers of obfuscation SystemD adds, especially with JournalD, leaves me not really sure where to even look
It is tempting to say screw it and load up Gentoo on my desktop though
Gentoo seems fun, I wanna try it some day. I would also recommend Void if you’re looking for a distro with a boring old binary package manager (it’s what I use on my laptop). Although the package list in Void is rather barren, I would recommend installing Flatpak to help fill in the gaps for some of the missing packages. There’s also Alpine if you wanna go balls deep into the minimalism rabbithole. What makes Alpine so difficult is that it’s a musl libc distro, so anything that needs glibc (i.e. any “serious” gui application) needs to run through a compatibility layer like gcompat or flatpak. Void is available in both glibc and musl libc flavours.
The community aspect can definitely be a big hurdle. Most of the time if you search for something like “<description of your issue> ubuntu”, you can more or less blindly copy-paste the commands from the first result and it will work. With niche distros, you have to be able to interpolate instructions aimed at other distros and actually understand what you’re doing. That why I would never recommend a non-systemd distro to someone who’s new to linux.
By the way, what’s your network issue? I’m no expert, but maybe I can try to help?
It seems to be an issue with using a 5.8 gigahertz WiFi endpoint, which has worked fine up until a couple days ago when it started dropping packets going outside my local network: I could watch a continuous ping start failing for a couple minutes while using Synergy to control my laptop that was connected to my work VPN without issue, so it only seemed to be an issue routing outside my network, which is really weird. Switching to the 2.4 gigahertz channels seems to have fixed it entirely.
What I need to do is look up the JournalD commands to be able to read the logs correctly and find what I’m after… Might also spin up a VM to see if that goes out at the same time, would be interesting if the VM can still work while the host is dropping packets…
So switching to a slower wifi AP causes packets destined for outside of your network to not be dropped? That sounds like one of those cursed issues that’s a complete nightmare to track down lol. Maybe the faster speed of the 5.8ghz network is causing your router to get overwhelmed or something? Does the same issue happen if you connect via ethernet? I don’t really know what else can cause this, I hope you can get it fixed!
Since my other systems were unaffected, I’m pretty sure it’s something on my PC, possibly an update for the Wi-Fi drivers introduced a bug that affects the 5.8 channels
It’s been stable since switching so it’s more academic at this point, I have no burning need to be connected to the 5ghz channels
Things like this are why I don’t put systemd on my machines. It’s too complicated for me. Too many things going on. I’ve moved away from mac os to linux specifically to avoid weird over-engineered solutions, I want to be able to understand my system, not just use it!
EDIT:
We’re not there yet with systemd, but I would argue that Alpine Linux qualifies as “busybox/Linux” lol. It’s literally just the kernel, busybox, openrc, and a package manager stapled together. It’s so minimalist that it barely even exists! I love that distro so much!
Honestly, the only reason I’m not using a non-SystemD distro is this is my first time actually going all in and having larger communities to help with issues plus just trying to force myself to learn it since it seems like it’s not going away
But yeah, I’m not a fan.
Working through a networking issue right now and the layers of obfuscation SystemD adds, especially with JournalD, leaves me not really sure where to even look
It is tempting to say screw it and load up Gentoo on my desktop though
Gentoo seems fun, I wanna try it some day. I would also recommend Void if you’re looking for a distro with a boring old binary package manager (it’s what I use on my laptop). Although the package list in Void is rather barren, I would recommend installing Flatpak to help fill in the gaps for some of the missing packages. There’s also Alpine if you wanna go balls deep into the minimalism rabbithole. What makes Alpine so difficult is that it’s a musl libc distro, so anything that needs glibc (i.e. any “serious” gui application) needs to run through a compatibility layer like gcompat or flatpak. Void is available in both glibc and musl libc flavours.
The community aspect can definitely be a big hurdle. Most of the time if you search for something like “<description of your issue> ubuntu”, you can more or less blindly copy-paste the commands from the first result and it will work. With niche distros, you have to be able to interpolate instructions aimed at other distros and actually understand what you’re doing. That why I would never recommend a non-systemd distro to someone who’s new to linux.
By the way, what’s your network issue? I’m no expert, but maybe I can try to help?
It seems to be an issue with using a 5.8 gigahertz WiFi endpoint, which has worked fine up until a couple days ago when it started dropping packets going outside my local network: I could watch a continuous ping start failing for a couple minutes while using Synergy to control my laptop that was connected to my work VPN without issue, so it only seemed to be an issue routing outside my network, which is really weird. Switching to the 2.4 gigahertz channels seems to have fixed it entirely.
What I need to do is look up the JournalD commands to be able to read the logs correctly and find what I’m after… Might also spin up a VM to see if that goes out at the same time, would be interesting if the VM can still work while the host is dropping packets…
So switching to a slower wifi AP causes packets destined for outside of your network to not be dropped? That sounds like one of those cursed issues that’s a complete nightmare to track down lol. Maybe the faster speed of the 5.8ghz network is causing your router to get overwhelmed or something? Does the same issue happen if you connect via ethernet? I don’t really know what else can cause this, I hope you can get it fixed!
Since my other systems were unaffected, I’m pretty sure it’s something on my PC, possibly an update for the Wi-Fi drivers introduced a bug that affects the 5.8 channels
It’s been stable since switching so it’s more academic at this point, I have no burning need to be connected to the 5ghz channels