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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#21

Post by lmm »

meddlepal wrote: post #13
Whatitat90 wrote: post #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.

It seems the systemd hate mostly comes from a philosophical position these days than anything grounded in real user impact. You either agree or disagree with what systemd does, or do not care because you are not aware of it (which I would argue is a good thing). Personally I think it is great. Sysvinit scripts were terrible to write and frequently had bugs because the scripts were usually afterthoughts "Oh yea... I g…

> Sysvinit scripts were terrible to write and frequently had bugs because the scripts were usually afterthoughts "Oh yea... I guess we need one of those things".

There were alternative solutions to that problem that didn't require replacing a long and ever-growing list of system components with tightly-coupled (and often buggy) systemd versions. In fact people who really cared about their init system were already using them.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#22

Post by boomboomsubban »

Whatitat90 wrote: post #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.

People's perceptions aren't unified. Some people will always dislike SystemD, and they are not be forced to use it. If every major distro maintainer loves it, some people still would hate it.

There's still a group of Unix users upset about the major init split that happened fourth years ago. Things will never be unified.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#23

Post by choeger »

enriquto wrote: post #16
sjwright wrote: post #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 d…

Notice that nobody complains about the existence of systemd, but about the enormous and shady pressures that distros had (particulary debian) to adopt it as standard. Nowadays, the complain is mostly about the systemd monoculture.

In fact many people did complain about the existence - I have read actual demands that distros should actively work against it back in the days. Also the personal attacks against Lennart make it difficult to see any rational point in the whole debate.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#24

Post by mruts »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #12

I get that not everybody likes systemd, but a lot of the criticisms seem misguided and looking at sysvinit with role-colored glasses. For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that. Yes, there's parts to systemd that not everyone will use, like container support, but in that case you can pretty safely ignore that use case. For me, systemd has p…

I don’t think anyone thinks that sysvinit is better than systemd, but RC definitely is.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#25

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #12

I get that not everybody likes systemd, but a lot of the criticisms seem misguided and looking at sysvinit with role-colored glasses. For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that. Yes, there's parts to systemd that not everyone will use, like container support, but in that case you can pretty safely ignore that use case. For me, systemd has p…

> I can't say I miss sysvinit.

Distros that choose not to employ systemd do not necessarily retain sysvinit.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#26

Post by lmm »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #18
qxcbr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME, so... LxQt and any KDE-powered distro would beg to differ. But I agree, in general, that KDE-default distros are few and far between. And the KDE team probably has better things to do with their time than try to maintain a systemd-less fork.

They're rare in the US. KDE-as-default is close to the norm in Europe.

KDE has long been a more crossplatform system than Gnome (much better windows support (and even e.g. solaris), BSD is treated as first-class) so I'd hope they'll continue to avoid being systemd-dependent.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#27

Post by NikkiA »

meddlepal wrote: post #13
Whatitat90 wrote: post #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.

It seems the systemd hate mostly comes from a philosophical position these days than anything grounded in real user impact. You either agree or disagree with what systemd does, or do not care because you are not aware of it (which I would argue is a good thing). Personally I think it is great. Sysvinit scripts were terrible to write and frequently had bugs because the scripts were usually afterthoughts "Oh yea... I g…

sysvinit was at least a thousand times easier than bsd init scripts, and I occasionally see people that are opposed to both systemd and sysvinit and think rc.local was 'it'.

shakes head slowly

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#28

Post by telmich »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #22
Whatitat90 wrote: post #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.

People's perceptions aren't unified. Some people will always dislike SystemD, and they are not be forced to use it. If every major distro maintainer loves it, some people still would hate it. There's still a group of Unix users upset about the major init split that happened fourth years ago. Things will never be unified.

I think the main problem is not the init process, but the tooling around it that breaks systems. For instance systemd-resolved did break local resolving some years ago (maybe still today).

While it is optional, ubuntu installations come with it turned on by default.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#29

Post by telmich »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #19
lmm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The objections to systemd are still as valid as ever. We still see a pretty high rate of security vulnerabilities in it. However, as projects adopt systemd-proprietary APIs, distros are forced to choose between maintaining ongoing forks of those projects, dropping those projects, or adopting systemd. E.g. I suspect Slackware only avoided being forced to adopt it because they'd already decided to not support gnome.

High rate? Compared to the Linux kernel, systemd's CVE rate is very low.

Do you have a source for it?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#30

Post by telmich »

dantondwa wrote: post #11
telmich wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In the benefits of Alpine, you have put that the sound is great. Out of curiosity, what makes it better than other Linux distros?

Simplicity mostly. It just works. It feels so clean, nothing running there that is not supposed to be there. Installing something takes only sub-seconds, because packages are small.

Alpine really is a beauty.

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