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Linux distros without systemd

ungleich.ch

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#2
Alpine is great. I have nothing against systemd but Alpine stands on it's own for containers and VMs. I haven't given it a try on baremetal but I imagine it does just as well there. Not really desktop focused but if you want to run it with a GUI on a laptop it's technically possible.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#3

Alpine is great. I have nothing against systemd but Alpine stands on it's own for containers and VMs. I haven't given it a try on baremetal but I imagine it does just as well there. Not really desktop focused but if you want to run it with a GUI on a laptop it's technically possible.

I've actually tried it on my new notebook a few days ago, it runs quite nice: https://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/alpine-linux-on-the-hp...

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#4
SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019?

All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo).

I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#5
Love this!

Notice that the text about slackware sounds a bit "pessimistic", as if it was a somewhat legacy distribution. Nothing further from the truth. We run a small farm of virtual machines with different up-to-date distributions, and slackware is typically the one that follows upstream packages more closely. For example it had gcc 9.1, bash 5, etc. a few days after they were released.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#7

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

They didn't really have an option: the same organisation controls GNOME and systemd, so they introduced systemd as a hard dependency of GNOME to force distros to adopt systemd. And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME, so...

Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly. Even Gentoo struggles with that, as it takes them a long time to release new versions of GNOME because they have to write the patches to strip out systemd first.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#8
I get no end of bemusement from open source advocates that think it makes any kind of rational sense to campaign against an open source project. THIS IS ALL OPEN SOURCE. Freedom and choice is the whole point, isn't it?

If you prefer an alternative or forebear to systemd, that is great. Use it. Advocate for the system you prefer. Convince people that the choice you have made is better.

Meanwhile the vast majority of distributions have voluntarily chosen systemd. Perhaps if its critics reflect on the reality of that shift, they could look at ways to improve the alternative to address its perceived deficiencies—just as GCC started doing now that LLVM has taken a bite out of their dominance.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#9

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

> SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019?

The reasons for the controversies have not really changed (lennart, the idea that it's not "unixy", a takeover of many subsystems by various systemd components, …) so people who didn't like systemd years ago probably still don't.

As somebody who's not really involved, I found Benno Rice's The Tragedy of Systemd[0] interesting and enlightening.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#10
One of the better videos on this subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY

BSDCan 2018—Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd

"systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. Depending on who you ask it's either a complete violation of the UNIX philosophy, a bloated pile of bugs, a complete violation of the elegant simplicity it replaced or, it most cases, some or all of the above. So why have so many Linux distributions taken to it? Is it as bad as people say?

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