Hi.
I have been using Manjaro for about a year. I am happy with it except that it is missing normal log files. Is it possible to enable normal logging? Preferrably disabling journald altogether, but I don’t mind it being there if I would just be able to read normal log files in /var/log.
If not, I will start migrating from Manjaro.
I think systemd is the worst thing that has happened for Linux. Would be happy to uninstall it and use normal sysv or bsd init, but unfortunately, most distributions have started using this. I can see no benefit of binary log files (or anything else provided by systemd).
it’s not like you have too many options now. whatever u migrate to make sure they have systemd shims in place in that distro, most of the complimentary software also require systemd now. can only recommend MX from non-systemd yet systemd-shim enabled distros.
It is indeed quite possible to run something like rsyslogd alongside or instead of journald.
systemd has always been controversial, and by the looks of things, it’s going to remain controversial for quite a while longer.
Yet, if you do look more closely at what systemd offers — and you keep in mind that sysvinit is buggy and no longer maintained — then systemd really is progress. It boots up faster, it supports advancements in the kernel such as cgroups, it can monitor daemons and automatically restart them if necessary, and so on.
Most rejections of systemd are just conservative knee-jerks. I know because I used to ride that same bandwagon. But I took the time to read up on what systemd can do and how it works, and now I don’t see myself ever going back to sysvinit. Yes, it’s a different way of doing things, but so what, if it’s better?
Yes I know systemd boots faster. But I can’t imagine why that would be important on most machines. For example most (hardware) servers take forever to boot. The OS boot time doesn’t make much of a difference there. And rebooting a virtual server is never that critical if the boot takes a few seconds more or less. And for my home computers, I can’t see how the boot time matters as I don’t reboot them more than a few times a year.
The daemon monitoring and restarting might be handy.
What I don’t like is that it tries to do everything, instead of the unix philosophy of doing one time and doing it well.
A few annoyances are:
Random boot order. The system might boot. Or it might not. You never know. Seems to cause less issues nowadays though. Maybe they fixed something.
Integrated “less” in command output unless you specify an option to avoid that. Major annoyance.
Changed order of parameters to systemctl compared to the old commands / start scripts. For example if you want to run systemctl stop abcd1234, then status, then start, then status. Much simpler with the old init scripts (or command) to just do arrow up, backspace, and type whatever parameter.
Cryptic or non-existant error messages. For example if you do systemctl start apache. It says nothing, you think all is ok until you start getting phone calls about a web site not working. Running systemctl status apache gets you a cryptic error message about running journalctl. This is not simplification.
Debugging .service-files is not straight-forward. Sometimes, running the commands specified in the service file, with the user specified in the service file works perfectly. But running it with systemctl won’t work 100%. Without any errors.
I see many negative things about systemd, but only a few positive…
And, I forgot, rebooting a computer with systemd just kills everything dead. No warnings to users about the reboot. No message about this in terminals connected to the servers. Just “connection closed”.
Most of Manjaro’s users are working from laptops, and most also either hibernate their systems or shut them down overnight. For them, it certainly does matter.
It doesn’t. systemd is very modular, and you only need to be running the parts you like. For instance, I have no use for systemd-homed, so I’m not using it.
You can continue running the more traditional sysvinit services if that is what you prefer, because systemd is compatible with sysvinit scripts.
Haven’t had that problem yet so far in the three years I’ve been running Manjaro.
That’s a matter of personal preference. I for one like it.
That’s nitpicking. The syntax makes perfect sense, and at least it’s consistent. And that goes for the different commands as well as for the .service files.
systemdstartsapache, but apache's configuration is site-specific and therefore up to the system administrator.
As I said, it’s a different way of doing things, which comes with a bit of a learning curve, but everything is properly documented.
Manjaro is based upon Arch, and Arch chose to adopt systemd. For a while, we’ve also offered openrc, but considering that this is not a native init- system on Arch, it required some maintenance.
Manjaro only has a small team of developers, and there wasn’t enough interest in openrc, nor could we dedicate enough people to the implementation of openrc in Manjaro, so it was dropped. There is however at least one Manjaro fork that still uses openrc, although I forgot its name.
You are free to file a feature request upstream about that.
Notes:
Please don’t make this into an anti-systemd diatribe. Discussions like that are completely pointless and can go on forever.
I believe your question has been answered, so I’ll mark that post as the solution. If you disagree with this choice, then you can reassign the solution to another post.
use rsyslog change nothing, we use always systemd !
read wiki
By default, all syslog messages are handled by systemd’s journal. In order to gather system logs in rsyslog, you either have to turn on #journald’s syslog-forward feature or use the #imjournal module of rsyslog to gather the logs by importing it from the systemd journald.
so it’s a useless overlay, for those who don’t want to use the excellent journalctl command.
If we don’t want systemd: we don’t use manjaro
bad subject title : normal log is journald for manjaro
