Just a question, I don’t really need any help. There doesn’t seem to be a questions and answers section of the forums so I’ll post this here.
What does a stock (xfce) Manjaro system do at startup after the base system is loaded before and after a user logs in?
I notice the mouse cursor for a few minutes indicates something is busy.
I’ve noticed pacman is doing something, checking for updates I suppose.
I’ve noticed kworker changes task a bunch.
I’ve heard pacman queries and sorts mirrors sometimes by itself.
I’ve looked at chron jobs but there are none, is this an outdated method of adding start-up tasks?
I’d like to know more about what my system does by itself I’ve not actually asked it to do.
Well, I can’t speak for XFCE specifically ─ I’m a Plasma user ─ but there are two major categories of things that the system does at startup.
All of the things that the system needs to do at startup, i.e. initializing the peripherals, mounting filesystems, setting up the network connection, starting system services, and so on.
All of the things that would normally be taken care of at certain points in time when the system is most likely expected to be idle, such as trimming the filesystems on an SSD, rotating the logs, cleaning out the temporary files in /var/tmp ─ /tmp itself is on a tmpfs in Manjaro, so it’s empty at boot ─ and so on. If those things were not executed because the system was down at the time that those tasks were scheduled, then they will be executed on the next boot.
That said, if this is a new installation, then there may be some things that you don’t need and that get loaded at boot nevertheless, and so you can safely disable those. An example of that would for instance be BlueTooth support, perhaps also the ModemManager, and so on.
That all said, there might be some variation depending on the hardware, but my system here ─ Intel i5-8400, booting from an SATA3 SSD ─ boots up from pressing Enter at the GRUB menu to the sddm login screen in about 10 seconds, and from typing my password and hitting Enter at the sddm screen to a fully functional desktop takes another second and a half. That’s pretty fast.
Not too much else I can think of besides whatevers in your DE, etc.
The only one thats manjaro specific is the pamac timer
(please take care with the difference between pamac and pacman)
The systems, as mentioned in previous replys are: systemd and journald.
opensource.com had an article, “Understanding systemd at startup on Linux” discussing systemd and journald at https://opensource.com/article/20/5/systemd-startup that might be helpful.
