Spyke
neidu3reply
sh.itjust.works

I like this answer: short and accurate enough.

systemd handles a lot more than starting/stopping things, but that's the core of it. It is used by many (most?) up to date linux distros, but some stick to the older and simpler initd.

3
mmcintyrereply
lemmy.world

Probably yes. The mx iso used to come with an unused but available systemd that you could boot into instead of the default sysvinit, but now they have 2 different isos for the 2 different systems. If the iso is recently downloaded, you would have had to pick which to use.

https://mxlinux.org/blog/changes-coming-with-mx-25/

2

Yes, but with a caveat: systemd is included, but by default something else is used instead (don't remember what). Systemd can be enabled if you so wish.

Source: I used mx a few years back. I may not be up to date on this.

1

It manages your services at boot and allows you to start and restart them. If the HAL is the buffer between the kernel and the hardware, then systemd provides a layer between the kernel and the user/services. It's a super generic answer full of holes, but it's easy to start with

5
piefed.social

The https://systemd.io/ main page has a pretty succinct answer to this:

systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system.

systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux control groups, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic.

Other parts include a logging daemon, utilities to control basic system configuration like the hostname, date, locale, maintain a list of logged-in users and running containers and virtual machines, system accounts, runtime directories and settings, and daemons to manage simple network configuration, network time synchronization, log forwarding, and name resolution.

2
Treczoksreply
lemmy.world

If someone has to ask what systemd is, do you expect him / her to understand this answer?

2

Not every term, certainly. But the first paragraph is a good at describing the primary purpose. And the last paragraph shows the breadth of services provided. I shared it thinking it could be the basis for further learning, or exploration of the project website to go and read more about it.

3

You reached the end

what is systemd ?? | Spyke