What are some significant differences to expect when switching to an alternative, and can that affect gaming compatibility and performance?
What are some significant differences to expect when switching to an alternative, and can that affect gaming compatibility and performance?
The main functional difference between systemd and others is that systemd will just work. Others will require you hand tune and hand tinker with a non-mainstream Linux distro.
If your hobby is init systems by all means mess around though.
I personally quite like systemd. Unit files are clean, timers services and sockets are easy to manage etc.
Honestly it’s a non-problem. Best advice is to use what is best supported. Don’t let the extremely fringe (but loud) tiny group of systemd haters throw you off.
As someone who’s created a timer, cron is much more straightforward.
Systemd has its good points, but most of that is the core functionality as a sysvinit replacement in my opinion. And it’s entirely likely that at least one of the newer alternatives is a better option for that.
I think if you know cron from the start it can be easier, but it gets really annoying really fast.
Compare:
0 0 * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /tmp/myjob.lock bash -c 'sleep $((RANDOM % 3600)) && /usr/local/bin/myjob.sh'To:
[Timer] OnCalendar=daily RandomizedDelaySec=1hThat and things like systemd preventing overlapped delays, handing what to do if the system was down during the last cycle, built in logging and event tracking. Seeing successful vs non successful runs etc.
Once you add in those production requirements cron gets annoying fast and timers are easy.
For adding a quick thing to make something happen at a specific time, I can add a cron job in a couple of minutes. To add a timer takes creating a couple of files with syntax that took me a while to look up last time I needed it, and running a command. Then debugging. Sure, the timer has benefits, but cron jobs are still simpler.
On the bright side, there’s actually a “crontab -t” command that apparently can be used to generate timer files from a crontab line, which I hadn’t known of before today.
That’s because you know cron. If you knew timers equally as well they would be easier. And they let you handle the edge cases (retry, randomness, tracking, logs etc) without the need for a custom script.
Once you factor in the production edge cases I think timers are clearly easier. You get all of it for free.
I can add the two files required to run a timer in systemd in a couple minutes, but writing the complex incantation to cron for having it do something that is the default in systemd is pure pain and takes me 3 hours of googling