I would love to use such a thing!
I'm bugged with programs I don't use anymore which start on system boot. Even after removing some programs, they just don't go away.
A sandboxed environment would be really good to use!
I'm bugged with programs I don't use anymore which start on system boot. Even after removing some programs, they just don't go away.
A sandboxed environment would be really good to use!
The only example I can think of where you might run into problems is if your desktop environment is doing some weird sessions. But that's usually fixed pretty easily in the system settings for whatever desktop environment you're running.
This is all pretty basic stuff; you shouldn't need a sandboxed environment to prevent applications from auto-launching unless you're going around installing malware (and if you are deliberately installing malware on your main bare-metal OS, then you're insane).
Furthermore, given typical CPU/RAM overheads on modern hardware, disabling something that takes a fraction of a second to start and consumes almost no RAM can seem slightly pointless!
I'm not familiar with systemd, but upstart takes a similar approach to sysvinit - don't want something to start? Just move it out of /etc/init/ like you would have rm'd the symlink in /etc/rc?.d/ :)
That's a problem systemd is trying very hard to solve.
/sarcasm
SysV init may be old, crufty, and inelegant, but it's reasonably straightforward to parse and troubleshoot manually (and BSD-style rc inits are even more straightforward). Making the bootstrap process nondeterministic strikes me as tremendously unwise.
I will probably be proved wrong as systemd matures, but right now it's just not the case.
I used to be a huge ArchLinux fan but them switching away from their rc.conf model to systemd felt like a real kick in the teeth.
Yeah . . . I doubt it. I made the switch to FreeBSD as my primary OS of choice back in 2005 or 2006 without being 100% certain why I decided to try to live on BSD Unix pretty much full-time right then (there were reasons, but I think the timing of the migration was largely whim). I never even missed the Linux world for the next half decade or so. I then tried living with Debian again for a while (long story why), and I discovered that everything of substance that had gone on in the Linux world since then seemed almost tailor-made to annoy the shit out of me. It was a real shock that destroyed the fondness I still harbored for Debian.
I poked around at some other Linux distributions I hadn't tried, or handn't used in years, and discovered they were even worse -- and systemd is sorta the apotheosis (no relation) of exactly the sort of nondeterministic, "the software knows better than the user" BS that I remembered with severe loathing from my distant past primarily using (and fixing, for a living) MS Windows. Between Red Hat developers like Drepper and Poettering, the agenda of Canonical and Ubuntu, and the GNU project's strange synthesis of superficially opposed concepts like stagnation and invidious undermining of anything related to the (so-called) Unix philosophy of system design, I ultimately came to the conclusion that outside of a professional capacity (that is, writing code and/or managing servers, and that only if I'm paid) I'm simply not interested in screwing around with Linux-based systems any longer.
Your tolerance may be higher than mine but, given your comment about what you dislike about systemd, I rather suspect you'll only grow more frustrated with the direction of Linux development community efforts over time. You might want to think about diversifying your OS experience in the near future (if you haven't already) so you have a place to ready and waiting for you to go when the Linux world has finally pushed you to the point of just wanting to escape.
I wasn't particularly aware of systemd's emergence and the squabbling that went on at the time, but I got exposed to it a gen or 2 after it first hit fedora through a fedora centric project. At first I was non-plussed and sort of annoyed that I didn't know how things worked, and primarily relied on the compatibility bridge with service that worked well enough.
At one stage I ended up having to do some tweaking with rc init scripts would have required a fair amount of haks (in the pejorative sense) and since these wouldn't work in systemd i decided it was the time to get to know it.
It only took me a couple of hours to get a good overall sense of the system and mindset, and the minor things I needed to get accomplished ended up being much cleaner in systemd once I "got it".
Once I had a good new mental model of it, I found that I liked working with systemd much more than the old guard. Ignoring the technical and performant advantages, I find the framework for discovering and resolving problems to be much more effective and easy to deal with once you got over the hump of the confusing bits of information overload and changed grammars.
I've never been a huge fan of Lennart Poettering in the way that he seems to optimize for friction in certain communities, but I think systemd is a real step forward and we need people like him to drag up forward kicking and screaming at times.
I user a lot of different posix systems day to say, and it's gotten to the point that I now groan when i have to deal with one still using a traditional init approach.
I'm not saying systemd is without issues, but if you give it some time with an open mind I think you may find out it has a lot going for it (and not just the marketing bullet points - thats part of lennart's problem)
unfortunately it seems to be dead.