Good job nobody called or those seconds might have been forever lost.

Are using a UI for "date" as your argument?

Admittedly, setting the timezone is pain these days but thats because of the same thinking i.e make a simple thing as complex as possible.

Me too, but then I never left :)

But all these systems do exactly that too and its harder to find out why when they do.

I dont have three, I have four but Im very much with you on this.

Linux with systemd is finished for me at home and at work, well thats tough to change but I have started the debate.

One thing that made me thump my head against a wall with SMF was when a system booted but I couldnt ssh into it. sshd was not started because utmp was not "enabled" because mounting the filesystems failed because a single file system didnt mount. Ok, its fixable but sshd ran perfectly if started manually and it delayed getting production systems up by a few minutes. We get journalists knocking at the door if our systems are down.

I hate this stuff, none of my admins remember where the damn log files are because they play with it so rarely. A load of scripts run in sequence can easily be followed, however rusty you are.

Geography is not altered by your political affiliations.

Never heard of init?

Its good for me.

I might recommend Slackware in a professional environment as its the only Linux distribution I am aware of that is truly knowable and stable. However, it needs a good architect to design and develop the systems and procedures in order to keep it in tip top condition. If you have those resources then yes, I would recommend it. It wont break stuff.

With regards to Patricks Volkerdings conundrum, he has made good choices in the past and Slackware has the stated aim of being a real Unix :) However we will see I guess.

Who in their right minds ever relies on a PID file? I never have in nearly thirty years.

Nothing is stopping you running your init scripts in parallel if you need it.

This makes no sense.

Can you explain how SYS V stops you having an implementation that is consistant across all installation any more than say, systemd or svcs does?

Roll out your base image and then your configuration management tool automatically builds all the other cruft on top of it. Cant see the difference

Absolutely, 100% agree.

It a complete distaster and addresses a problem that wasnt even there. rc.d or init.d were universally understood and even the dummest sys admin could get something in there. On Solaris for example, nobody ever remembers how to do it or how to check when something hasnt worked so you find people shoving re-start scripts in cron instead or using some config management tool.

With a Unix system you used to be able to follow the boot process from start to login just by looking at inittab and following the trail. This was great for newbies and great for finding out why things were not happening as they should.

systemd is the one of the worst thing Ive seen on Linux (apart from recent updates to su silently breaking any script that does su - username from root and then attempts to write to /dev/stdout) but it did get me back to my old friend Slackware after many years.

If I were a criminal in the US entering a home where the occupant could likely have a gun. I think I might be predisposed to shoot said occupant on sight and save myself some trouble.

The police know the right people too