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Comment by tzakrajs | Hacker News Reader

SysV init was so full of fail (race conditions, no dependency management, slow as hell, stupid metaphors -- run levels? really?) that people wrote Systemd. Anyone can expand on systemd to have it do stupid shit it shouldn't. But you can do that with any technology that is composable. It does not mean that the core of systemd isn't anything short of incredibly useful.

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And yet Linux distros like Ubuntu around 9.0 were much more stable than these days.

With 16.04 I get core lockups (Intel microcode) and cannot switch out of X with Ctrl-Alt-F1.

NetworkManager no longer connects the mobile surfstick, so I do it manually now with pppd.

I can't claim that I had a specific problem with systemd, but I never had an issue with SysVinit either.

The overall trend however is that Linux distros accumulate crapware by RedHat's NIH developers. I'm not surprised that NetworkManager is also by RedHat.

I assumed the new network layer in ubuntu 18.04 (which replaced /etc/network/interfaces) was some pan-distro/redhat inspired solution.

Apparently not -- netplan is ubuntu originated. They don't do themselves any favours.

I was really disappointed by this myself. Netplan seems slick, but I don’t want yet another new, distributor-specific way to manage this stuff. Red Hat seems to be quite good at wrangling such tooling, but I don’t know of a solution by them/others as slick as the netplan config.

Ctrl+Alt+F1 switching is not possible unless you expose virtual terminals on the other virtual displays. Arch Linux at least does this by default, except that your first X session will start on the same display as your virtual terminal (which is good for security relative to the earlier practice of moving Xorg to VT7 while leaving an active shell on VT1).

For networking I suggest looking at ConnMan. It has a somewhat unintuitive UI, but it is lightweight, fast, and I have yet to find a wireless network that it will not let me connect to.

> and cannot switch out of X with Ctrl-Alt-F1.

You can't switch users within x either, it's been broken since at least 14.04 (according to an old close bug report I found). It works the first time but on subsequent tries you just get the lock screen.

The bug report was closed after several years of nothing.

Since some time my main Linux box won't continue booting to the graphical login manager unless I hit some random keys (any will do) on the keyboard. I guess there is some service asking interactively for something, but I can't see any prompt (maybe swallowed by systemd, who knows).

Since some time switching VTs resets all hardware accelerated applications (i.e. crashes them).

Since some time unlocking the graphical session is randomly broken and requires loginctl session-unlock from another VT (which then promptly triggers bug 2).

These things keep coming and going... it's not even Linux-specific. Stuff just breaks all the time and you shrug and move along, hoping that maybe someday it's fixed. For most of these I wouldn't even know who should receive a bug report. Maybe it's the graphical login, maybe the compositor, maybe mesa, maybe a kernel driver, maybe systemd, maybe maybe...

I have encountered this since 16.04.

On current Ubuntu releases gdm (login screen) now runs on VT1, which is what you are trying to switch to with Ctrl-Alt-F1. Your current session is likely on VT2 (Ctrl-Alt-F2)

You could try Ctrl-Alt-F3, F4, etc to get a login terminal.

I hated working with SysvInit but to be fair Debian's version of SysvInit had dependency support and parallelism and was therefore reasonably fast. The only real issue was how hard it was to write a correct script resulting in almost all of them having bugs in edge cases.

Not all SysvInit implementations were equal, which was an issue in itself.

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