If you’ve spent any time in the Linux community, you know that systemd is a hot topic. Some people love it because it handles everything; others wish it didn’t! But here’s the reality: almost every major Linux distribution (like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian) uses it today.
Think of systemd as the “manager” of your computer. When something goes wrong, like your Wi-Fi won’t connect or a creative app keeps crashing, systemd is the one with all the answers.
But where to find those answers? systemd has built-in tools that help you troubleshoot issues with your system. If you’re just starting your Linux journey, I recommend exploring the following four tools.
In Linux, background apps are called services. If your system is not accepting SSH connections, you use systemctl to see what’s happening under the hood.
I mean, before you try to fix something, you need to know if it’s actually broken.
This is the most important command in a Linux user’s toolkit. When you run it, pay attention to the Active line:
We’ve all heard it: “Have you tried restarting it?” Restart a service in Linux with .
When an app crashes, it doesn’t just vanish. It usually screams an error message into the void. Journalctl is the tool that catches those screams and saves them in a “journal” for you to read later.
Unlike old-school Linux logs (which were scattered across dozens of text files), systemd keeps everything in one central, encrypted location.
If you just type , you’ll see thousands of lines of code, most of it is boring stuff like “System time updated.” To be a good detective, you need to filter:
Targeting a Specific App: If you want to check the issue with a specific app, don’t read everything, just read the entries for that specific app:
Time Travel: Did your computer freeze two hours ago? You can ask the journal to show you only that time frame:
Is your computer taking forever to start up? Instead of guessing which app is slowing you down, you can ask systemd-analyze to blame the culprit. This tool measures every millisecond of your boot process and tells you exactly which service is holding things up.
Run this command to see a ranked list of the slowest-starting apps:
You might find that a “Modem Manager” you don’t even use is taking 2 minutes to start. This gives you the power to it and save time every time you turn on your PC.
Additionally, some apps can’t start until other apps are finished. If App A waits for App B, it creates a chain.
This shows you the path systemd took to reach your desktop. If one link in the chain is slow, the whole system feels sluggish. You can learn more about optimizing Linux boot speed in our dedicated guide.
Sometimes, an app doesn’t just have an error, it crashes completely. In programmer terms, it “dumped its core.” This means the app threw its entire memory onto the floor and quit.
Coredumpctl is like a forensic investigator. It lets you look at that memory “snapshot” to see what the app was doing right before it died.
To see a table of every app that has crashed on your system recently, use:
If you see that your favorite app crashed, you can get the full report by using its Process ID (PID) from the list:
This will show you things like the “Signal” (usually , which means the app tried to touch memory it wasn’t allowed to) and a “Stack Trace” (the last few functions the app ran).
By using these systemd tools, you’ve moved past the “I’ll just reboot and hope for the best” stage. You can now see the status of your apps, read their logs, speed up your boot time, and investigate crashes like a seasoned Linux user.
Next time something feels “off” on your Linux machine, don’t panic. Just remember: systemctl for the status, journalctl for the logs, systemd-analyze for the speed, and coredumpctl for the crash.
