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A Debian user has recently discovered that systemd prevents the skipping of fsck while booting:
With init, skipping a scheduled fsck during boot was easy, you just pressed Ctrl+c, it was obvious! Today I was late for an online conference. I got home, turned on my computer, and systemd decided it was time to run fsck on my 1TB hard drive. Ok, I just skip it, right? Well, Ctrl+c does not work, ESC does not work, nothing seems to work. I Googled for an answer on my phone but nothing. So, is there a mysterious set of commands they came up with to skip an fsck or is it yet another flaw?
One user chimed in with a hack to work around the flaw, but it involved specifying an argument on the kernel command line. Another user described this so-called "fix" as being "Pretty damn inconvenient and un-discoverable", while yet another pointed out that the "fix" merely prevents "systemd from running fsck in the first place", and it "does not let you cancel a systemd-initiated boot-time fsck which is already in progress."
Further investigation showed that this is a known bug with systemd that was first reported in mid-2011, and remains unfixed as of late December 2014. At least one other user has also fallen victim to this bug.
How could a severe bug of this nature even happen in the first place? How can it remain unfixed over three years after it was first reported?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:16AM
There are many distros that work for me. Shortage of Linux distros is not something that anyone, ever complained about. In worst case you can always hack one, or compile your own [gentoo.org], or make a new one from scratch. In the latter case it's a lot of work, but if the demand is real (and not just inside of your head) then you will have a good team to do this in a reasonable time. The major difference with Windows is that you can do it, both technically and legally.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:22AM
I don't have time to "hack" on my own distro, nor to roll one from scratch. I don't want to wait six months for Gentoo to compile on my Thinkpad. I don't want to use Slackware, and feel like I'm back in 1996. All I want is what Debian was a couple of years ago: a distro that was reliable, but still did all of the hard work for me, with an init system that just plain worked. In fact, Debian today would be perfect for me, if it didn't come infected with systemd. I'm not going to just use an old version of Debian, either, because I want to be able to easily use new versions of Chromium, and I want to make sure I get other security updates, too. There is a big shortage of good Linux distros today, now that almost all of them have gone stupid with systemd. Gentoo doesn't cut it. Slackware is ancient. Other than that, there's no good Linux distro. Hell, the whole point of using a distro in the first place is so that it's developers and package maintainers do the hard stuff so I don't have to! It totally defeats the purpose of using a distro if I have to start hacking on it just to make it barely usable!
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:30PM
Doing some of your research for you, some options:
* PCLinuxOS [pclinuxos.com]
* Crux [crux.nu]
* as GP mentioned, Slackware still works, and has been kept quite up-to-date.
None of them have been showing any signs of adopting systemd.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:01PM
"All I want is..."
Translated:
- run the latest and greatest,
- have the system magically be to my tastes, including the way low-level processes operate, even though I don't code or use the system at a low level,
- not contribute to it,
- not pay a dime for it.
Apparently, given how many people are complaining while explicitly stating they do not want to contribute, it actually has already been The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Monday December 22 2014, @04:15PM
Right now I'm still running debian on my desktop and laptop, and not a systemd lib in sight. In the future, there will be forks without systemd. The world is not ending.
I agree it is sad, though, to see so many quality distros making such a terrible choice. It's inconceivable to me. How anyone who knows anything about UNIX can think this bloated crapware at PID 1 is a good idea is beyond me.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.