On Jun 16, 2024, at 8:57 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> 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).