
From this week's Distrowatch. Could be a problem in some circumstances.
The systemd project tends to stir up debate with each new feature it implements. One of the most recent changes to systemd (available in version 230), forces user processes to terminate when the user logs out. On some systems, such behaviour makes sense and effectively cleans up misbehaving processes when the user leaves. However, many administrators and developers rely on processes continuing to run to perform tests, backups or other tasks after they log off. Guus Sliepen summed up the concerns of the latter group quite nicely in a Debian bug report: It is now indeed the case that any background processes that were still running are killed automatically when the user logs out of a session, whether it was a desktop session, a VT session, or when you SSHed into a machine. Now you can no longer expect a long running background processes to continue after logging out. I believe this breaks the expectations of many users. For example, you can no longer start a screen or tmux session, log out, and expect to come back to it. For this reason, I think it is a bad decision on the part of the systemd maintainers to enable this feature by default, and it should rather be disabled by default in Debian." A similar discussion is taking place on a Fedora mailing list. The new default systemd behaviour can be disabled (either by distributions or system administrators) by editing the logind configuration file.