Answers

Q Disabled or stopped

I noticed that on my laptop running Fedora 31 under Xfce, Bluetooth is automatically activated upon starting up. I looked around for a way to disable it by default, but frankly the terminal’s output when checking whether the Bluetooth service is still running puzzles me. It tells me the service is still active, see below the terminal output. Is this correct and to be expected?

Jude Lee

A Sometimes systemd’s use of

English can be a little counterintuitive. You start and stop services using the start and stop commands for systemctl. The enable and disable options refer to what happens at boot, they do not affect the currently running instance. So $ systemctl stop bluetooth.service will stop the service, but it will be restarted at the next boot, while prevents it starting at next boot, but does not stop the running instance.

To stop it and prevent it restarting, you need to issue both of the commands. However, this may not be enough to prevent a service from running, as units can have dependencies. So if foo.service contains then starting foo will result in trying to start bar as well, even if you have run systemctl disable bar. This is usually a good thing, as it means you only need to