On Jun 16, 2024, at 10:41 PM, Bakul Shah wrote: > > On Jun 16, 2024, at 8:57 PM, ron minnich wrote: >> >> I'm curious, as to the original topic of this discussion: can anyone justify systemd-homed and how it works? Does that even look like 0% of a unix idea? > > > I am not a fan of systemd (or linux) and don't follow their excesses/adventures but I am not a fan of how BSD does initialization & brings up services either. They don't quite get all the dependencies right for all the possible combinations of devices etc. Its /etc/rc.d/* system is pretty clunky -- I tend to think any time you are repeating more or less the same boilerplate code in many files, something worth abstracting is hiding in there. > > I like how launchd treats a service as an object (more than just a program but also the auxiliary files and scripts). For me it was a lightbulb moment (like realizing how a function operates in an environment!). Though I'd probably use s-expr or a simpler config format, not xml (as in launchd plist/SMF manifest). > > At the other extreme of complexity we have things like Kubernetes. Not a fan. > > What I want is to be able to map all my computers and compute clusters into a single virtual machine -- where storage, IO and computing resources may be added / removed without taking the whole VM down, and where each display/input user interface is a window on the same underlying VM and all sharing is under my control. Plan9 does a bit of this but that experiment ended too early. Apple is tending in this direction though not cleanly (+ I don't want to rely on a faceless behemoth corp that may trample on my data without even meaning to). Forgot to mention LOCUS, which was the only distributed Unix compatible OS I am aware of. To anyone who has user/implementer experience, I would love to hear what worked well, what didn't, what was easy to implement, what was very hard and what you wished was added to it.