I’m planning to move over to Guix over NixOS, as soon as my current situation improves and possibly import a new libre respecting laptop (Star Labs is thankfully available in India). I do have a very old laptop with a Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM with Guix installed already, and what has come to my attention is that it uses shepherd.

I’m not actually against or for systemd, in fact, I am not really sure why I should even care - maybe it is because I’m still not on to the level of a power user. Since I’m starting to learn kernel basics to prepare for GNU/Hurd contributions in the nearest possible future and shepherd seems to be what the GNU folks will be using, is there any reason why I should even care about the freedom of init system?

Edit: I’m asking this because I came across this blog - What is systemd and Why Should I Care? and also because Guix uses shepherd, and I’m not sure how I’ll be affected.

  • yum13241@lemm.ee
    234·
    8 months ago

    Systemd is what most programs and systems have come to expect, and you shouldn’t bother changing your init system unless you have a VERY GOOD REASON.

    Some people hate it for not following the unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, but at this point nothing does except stuff like cat.

    • EddyBot@feddit.de
      15·
      8 months ago

      Some people hate it for not following the unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, but at this point nothing does except stuff like cat.

      you can actually write iso images to thumb drives with cat

      cat linux.iso > /dev/disk/by-id/usb-My_flash_drive
        • Atemu@lemmy.ml
          2·
          8 months ago

          It actually is. The file gets opened by bash and bash passes the file descriptor to cat but cat is the program which instructs the kernel to write to the device.

          Modern cat even does reflink copies on supported filesystems.

          • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
            4·
            8 months ago

            cat is writing to a file descriptor. Which is pretty much transparent to it. it’s just sometimes redirected. What happens when cat writes to it is not up to cat. In fact, I looked at the source of coreutils. there are two sub implementations of cat. copy_cat, which uses copy_file_range when the input and output are a regular file, and simple_cat which does a simple read/write loop. In both cases the target file descriptor is STDOUT_FILENO. So the target file descriptor is hardcoded to 1. Cat is not aware of where the data is coming from, or where it’s going. It is hardcoded to only ever write to stdout.

            edit: re the reflink thing, you were probably thinking of cp, not cat.

            • Atemu@lemmy.ml
              1·
              8 months ago

              simple_cat which does a simple read/write loop

              You just proved my own point. cat does the write(). Bash just configures where it writes to.

              re the reflink thing, you were probably thinking of cp, not cat.

              No, I was specifically thinking of cat. I just copied a 73G non-sparse incompressible file in 3 seconds using cat file > copy.

              copy_file_range does reflinks on btrfs.

      • Goun@lemmy.ml
        2·
        8 months ago

        You can even use echo, which is way faster

        echo linux.iso > /dev/disk/by-id/usb-My_flash_drive

        /s

    • chayleaf@lemmy.ml
      12·
      8 months ago

      actually many “Unix people” got mad at cat becoming “bloated”, because of options like -v (which escapes nonprinting characters)

      • interceder270@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 months ago

        This is why I focus on pragmatism above all else.

        Getting bogged down in theory is a good way to waste your life.