After a few conversations with people on Lemmy and other places it became clear to me that most aren’t aware of what it can do and how much more robust it is compared to the usual “jankiness” we’re used to.
In this article I highlight less known features and give out a few practice examples on how to leverage Systemd to remove tons of redundant packages and processes.
And yes, Systemd does containers. :)
systemd has made my life so much easier in so many ways. Other people prefer messing with bash files and there are definitely better alternatives for services like systemd-resolved, but basic service and timer management has improved massively.
I wish there was a good GUI for systemd, though. A lot of configuration options have moved to systemd files now, and for novices it’s hard to find what file does what and how to configure them. Several Linux distros and desktop environments have their own tools that read from/write to systemd files, but they’ll always lag behind the actual systemd resources.
I think an official systemd GUI to manage services and networks would make Linux a lot more usable for people with some computer knowledge but no time or interest in reading man pages. I’d imagine some kind of GUI like Windows has for system services (titled “advanced system settings” or whatever) that can do things like manage network adapters, alter DNS config, start/stop/enable/disable services, the whole deal.
The problem is that systemd has so many possible options and ways to do things that you’ll either end up with something that “lags behind the actual systemd resources” or a glorified text editor specially made to write systemd units.
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What about entire optional sections? Multiple options with the same name etc?
If systemd can parse them, the GUI can list them. A simple list view with add/edit/delete would work just fine.
Microsoft solved this problem decades ago:
Good old Win32 GUIs with their tabs can do anything. Too bad people don’t want those anymore.
People have been making services for decades and systemd is 13 years old. I kind of feel like it probably has virtually all of the options its ever going to have. Also most of what people would use such a GUI for is to start stop restart enable disable the thing people have been doing for an eternity which doesn’t require even displaying the unit file.