Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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cron vs systemd timers (self.debian)

submitted 1 month ago by GreatBlueHeron to c/[email protected]

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I'm a retired Unix (AIX) admin and I run some Linux servers at home. But, I'm still using Windows as a desktop. This whole Windows recall thing is the final straw - I'm switching to Linux for desktop. I've done a bit of research and believe Debian is the best fit for me. So, I recently installed it on one of my small servers.

I like it but I find the "half baked" approach to systemd a bit confusing. My default minimal server install has both cron jobs and systemd timers configured for basic system maintenance tasks. For example logrotate is fired twice a day - once by /etc/cron.daily/logrotate and once by /lib/systemd/system/logrotate.service. I'm tempted confirm that everything cron does is actually also done by systemd and then apt purge cron\* && rm -rf /etc/cron*. But, I suspect that might break future package installs and updates?

I'm also not excited by ifup/ifdown - why not just use the capability already included with systemd? This is just a minor thing for me as there's no real duplication I guess.

Is the a Debian based "pure systemd" distro??

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Debian the kinda system to have both just in case, what gets removed along with cron when you try?

[–] GreatBlueHeron 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

what gets removed along with cron when you try?


# apt-get --dry-run purge cron cron-daemon-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  cron* cron-daemon-common*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Purg cron [3.0pl1-162]
Purg cron-daemon-common [3.0pl1-162]

nothing!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Nice, I'll bet a bunch of long time users probably want cron, I mean like I had to deal with a ticket yesterday, user crying about telnet not being included in latest release. (But that's not debian related)