Lennart Poettering

6️⃣ Here's the 6th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

One of the now-standard files that systemd introduces is the /usr/lib/os-release file. It contains various fields with meta information on the OS and the OS image your system is running.

One of the fields in there is PRETTY_NAME= which contains the primary name of the OS for human consumption. It's a bit limited in some ways however. Given this is written…

Mar 9 at 8:18amWeb
Show threadLennart PoetteringMar 9

…quite often to the classic Linux console (which has very limited Unicode capabilities) it's not really a good idea to put fancy Unicode characters in it. Also, even though it's often shown in terminals, you cannot use ANSI sequences in it.

With v260 we added a new field to it: FANCY_NAME= – which is just like PRETTY_NAME= and is supposed to be used on modern terminals where Unicode + ANSI sequences are not an issue.

The various systemd tools now prefer it over PRETTY_NAME= when they…

Show threadLennart PoetteringMar 9
…determine that the terminal is powerful enough, and automatically fallback to PRETTY_NAME= otherwise.
Show threadNeal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) Mar 27
@pid_eins How do you determine what is a "powerful" terminal? And when systemd uses it, is there a case where it synthesizes the full distribution release string with it? That is, name + version + codename?