[mythtv-users] Recommended Linux Distro post CentOS

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2020 02:48:15 +0000 (UTC), you wrote:

>----- Original Message -----
>> From: "R. G. Newbury" <newbury at mandamus.org>
>
>> So what you are saying is that it was NOT actually ready for prime time
>> when it was released. Which many people complained about. It was a
>> replay of pulseaudio, which also was not ready for prime time when released.
>> 
>> Both are quite a bit better now, after huge amounts of effort by lots of
>> people to fix the stupid design decisions made by LP, except that
>> nothing has been done for the journal logs being incomprehensible and
>> not available *unless systemd is running*...
>
>So you can't even look at the syslog to see why systemd broke, if it breaks?
>
>Yeah; total non-starter.

In Ubuntu syslog still exists, as does kern.log.  But, as before
systemd, there are things that are not in syslog but in individual log
files.  And now some of those are only available as systemd journals -
it depends on the particular program and what options are used with
it.  And systemd's output is usually only in journal files.  Which you
can access externally by booting a live USB/DVD/PXE image using a
similar version of systemd and using journalctl from there, but it is
a pain.  However, there are various ways of debugging systemd problems
that do not need a live boot.  The one I use normally is to enable an
early start / late stop root console on Ctrl-Alt-F9 and use that to do
systemd commands when the system fails to boot.  That also works when
it fails to shut down properly.  I find that is easier to use than
what you used to have to do with init scripts.  And in Ubuntu 20.04,
systemd seems to be better set up so that you do not get boot failures
that you did with earlier versions.  They have got the timeouts and
dependencies better organised.  And if you are using a fast NVMe SSD,
the parallelism of boot up is wonderful - the boot times are very
fast.

So, yes, systemd is different.  There is a learning curve, but it is
not too bad as the documentation is quite good and there is plenty of
help on the net.  Yes, systemd does have some annoyances.  But its
advantages far outweigh its disadvantages.  I would not want to ever
go back to init scripts - they are very, very painful.