Arch update. (A.K.A Begone laziness!)

On july 20th, the Arch Linux developers announced that Grub legacy would not be supported anymore. On july 30th they announced that the default format of the main config file, /etc/rc.conf, has been changed. The reason of this change was to "unify the configuration of systemd and initscripts". Since I knew what initscripts were, I asked myself: wtf is systemd? A visit to the Arch wiki answered my question but I was too lazy to change anything. A few weeks passed and while I was watching a show I recently found out about, Linux Action Show, one of the news they were talking (season 23 episode 04) about was that Arch was probably gonna move to systemd. I went on the forums and there was a lot of talk about systemd. How fast it was, how many problems it was causing to some users, etc. I also read the arch-dev-public mailing list (this is the email that apparently started it all, the news that is) and well... I knew I had some work to do. I had to:

1) Ditch Grub legacy and install Grub2;

2) Update my rc.conf and create other needed files;

3) Switch to systemd.

As always, Arch wiki was a great source of information. Everything I needed was there. The switch from Grub legacy to Grub2 was very smooth (I even set a Arch wallpaper on the Grub screen). Updating my rc.conf (and creating the other files) was also smooth, just followed the wiki. I backed up all the files I had to alter but, like I said, these changes were very smooth and I ended up not using the back ups.

Now for systemd: followed the wiki and everything worked, except my samba server. But, 5 minutes later, using our good friend google, I found out that I needed to enable the nmbd daemon (the netbios name server). Easy enough: sudo systemctl enable nmbd.service. I had forgotten about it. A 5 minute fix, I'd also call this a smooth transition.

Arch Linux is a fantastic distro. Well documented and well "put-together". Not a single hitch in such a important upgrade.

One note on systemd: it is fast! My boot time got significantly faster. This is due to the fact that systemd knows which service (daemons) needs which service and starts what it can simultaneously.

And you fellow Archer, who's been lazy to adhere to the new configs Arch has been using, you should just get it over with. Took me around one afternoon to read and actually do all the stuff I described. And who knows when Arch will drop the support for the legacy rc.conf format and systemV initscripts?