Systemd had another busy year working on many new features from run0 as a sudo alternative to making systemd-homed more robust, increasing Varlink use, systemd-boot continuing to gain more traction, and more.
From the dozens of systemd articles on Phoronix over the course of 2024, here’s a look back at the most popular systemd articles of the year for reliving some of the greatest moments and as a reminder of the various new features that have come to pass this year.
It will be interesting to see what new innovative features are tackled by systemd in 2025.
systemd Rolling Out “run0” As sudo Alternative
Overnight systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon around systemd’s newest effort: run0 as a sudo-like command.
Systemd 256.1 Fixes “systemd-tmpfiles” Unexpectedly Deleting Your /home Directory
For those running the command “systemd-tmpfiles –purge” and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry… Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles’ home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory.
Systemd Looking At A Future With More Varlink & Less D-Bus For IPC
Taking place this week in Berlin was systemd’s annual “All Systems Go” developer conference. Among the interesting talks was Lennart Poettering talking about the ongoing challenges of D-Bus for inter-process communication (IPC) with systemd and how they are looking at Varlink for IPC needs moving forward.
Systemd 256-rc1 Brings A Huge Number Of New Features
Systemd 256-rc1 is available this evening and it comes with many new features and improvements to existing features. It’s a big one.
systemd Talks Up Automatic Boot Assessment In Light Of The Crowdstrike-Microsoft Outage
In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd’s Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.
GNOME Improving Integration With systemd-homed, Mockups For An OS Installer
In addition to KDE’s busy week of development work, GNOME developers have also been busy working on features like improving the systemd-homed integration and beginning to work on mock-ups for an OS installer.
GNU Shepherd 1.0 Service Manager Released As “Solid Tool” Alternative To systemd
GNU Shepherd as a service manager for both system and user services that is used by Guix and relying on Guile Scheme has finally reached version 1.0. For those not pleased with systemd, GNU Shepherd can be used as an init system and now has finally crossed the version 1.0 milestone after 21 years of development.
openSUSE Tumbleweed Is Finding Success Moving From GRUB To systemd-boot
While still an experimental option, the rolling-release systemd Tumbleweed Linux distribution is finding great results in using systemd-boot rather than the GRUB bootloader.
Debian Seeing Work To Support systemd-boot
Debian developer Luca Boccassi has begun working on systemd-boot support for using it as an alternative to the GRUB bootloader.
systemd 257-rc1 Released With A Ton Of New Features & Changes
Systemd 257-rc1 is out today as a big feature update for this release that brings many new features and other refinements to this key piece of the Linux operating system stack.
systemd 256 Released With run0, systemd-vpick, importctl & Other New Features
Systemd 256 is out today as the latest major feature update to this integral component to modern Linux distributions.
Sovereign Tech Fund Makes New Investments Into GNOME & PHP, Bug Bounty For systemd
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund has been making significant, much-needed investments into various open-source upstream projects from the GNOME desktop to Rust-written Coreutils and more. Today the Sovereign Tech Fund outlined their latest funding for advancing the open-source software ecosystem.
GNOME Continues Working On systemd-homed Integration, Better Web Browser
This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that details the latest improvements being made thanks to their Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) funding along with other development efforts squeezing into next month’s GNOME 47 desktop release.
systemd In 2023 Added Windows-Inspired “Blue Screen Of Death” & macOS-Inspired T.D.M.
As part of our various year-end articles, here is a look back at the most popular systemd stories on Phoronix for the past year.
GNOME Makes Progress On GPU-Accelerated Screencasting, systemd-homed Home Encryption
GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There’s some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support.
SysVinit 3.10 Released With Better Interoperability For systemd’s “machinectl stop”
While most Linux distributions are running on systemd as the init/service manager, SysVinit is continuing to be maintained. SysVinit 3.10 was released today with one new feature and some fixes. Coincidentally the new feature of SysVinit 3.10 is improving compatibility with systemd’s machinectl command.
systemd 256 Nears Release With run0, systemd-vpick, importctl & More
It looks like systemd 256 will officially debut as stable in the near future with systemd 256-rc3 being released today and not tacking on any new features compared to the prior release candidates.
systemd 256-rc2 Released With A Few More Features
The first release candidate of systemd 256 came just under one month ago with new features like run0 as the new sudo alternative, a new “systemd-vpick” binary, importctl as another new tool, Zboot kernel support with systemd ukify, systemd-homed improvements, and much more. Systemd 256-rc2 is out this evening with a few more features and other fixes collected over the past several weeks.
Feature-Packed systemd 257 Nears Release With RC3 Availability
Systemd 257 is nearing release as the next major feature release for this widely-used init system and software suite on Linux systems.
Busd Taking Shape As A D-Bus Broker Written In Rust
Open-source developer Zeeshan Ali Khan presented at last week’s systemd “All Systems Go” developer conference on busd as a new D-Bus broker written in the Rust programming language.
