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As I'm kind of confused what the idea behind systemd's system and user units or services is, I'd like to ask for an explanation.

Specifically I had thought system units are for units that are part of the vendor's operating system, while user units are for customer's local add-ons.

But it seems user units are handled differently by systemd (e.g. systemctl daemon-reload does not affect any user units, while the manual page claims: "Reload the systemd manager configuration. This will rerun all generators (see systemd.generator(7)), reload all unit files, and recreate the entire dependency tree."), so it's not just some organizational structure, but a truly semantic one.

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systemd runs a service manager for the system and a service manager for logged in users. System units can only be started/stopped by UID 0 and system services are run as UID 0 (except if you set User=), the user units can be started/stopped by the respective user and user services are run as the respective user.

To talk to the service manager of the user, use systemctl --user. In your example, you would have to call systemctl --user daemon-reload in order to reload the user units.

Note that user units cannot depend on system units and vice versa.

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  • So these are two independent mechanisms (user and system), accidentally implemented by the same program (systemd)? If so, only the "system" part is a replacement for "good old" init, while the "user" part is a new mechanism that didn't exist before? -- Maybe @segfault can add some more clarifying words on that...
    – U. Windl
    Commented May 6, 2019 at 7:36
  • "...*cannot depend on systemd units*..." should read "...*cannot depend on system units*...", I guess. Unfortunately such small edits are not allowed for me.
    – U. Windl
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 12:52

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