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Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

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Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#81

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

dizhn wrote: post #43
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will always be a fringe effort since the vast majority of the people doing the actual work are fine with it. It's been what, ten years by now? If instead of complaining all that time systemd haters cooperated and put in the work, they could have produced something (supposedly) much better by now. Alpine is probably your best bet, it's pretty widely used. All of the others are a minority of a minority of a minority…

Unfortunately alpine ships with a lot of init scripts that don't work. To make it worse it ships with init scripts that could never have worked. I don't know if discovering this should make me stay away from it as a distro or send patches (which is not trivial. I tried a few times). I do like < 3 minutes full distro version upgrades though.

What's an example of an init script that could never have worked?

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#82

Post by andrewaylett »

daneel_w wrote: post #68
andrewaylett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunately trivial to argue that Devuan is without point, as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd. As, indeed, they said they allow for would when they decided to adopt it. If anything, the presence of Devuan cements systemd even more tightly into position -- those who care about not running systemd are distracted by forking an enti…

>"as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd" There's obviously more to this (and to Devuan) than just uninstalling systemd and installing sysvinit. Devuan's package repo (for which Debian is the upstream) contains a lot of customizations to allow certain packages to function with a sysvinit foundation.

And my understanding is that Debian would be quite happy to have those customisations too -- maybe with a little more upfront effort, as they have to coexist with systemd support. But with less ongoing effort, as the code is at least present to be able to tell if a change will break it.

Ultimately though it's entirely up to the developers where they put their effort. If folk prefer to work on a fork, they're entitled to do that. And it is a bit refreshing to see people putting at least some effort into not-systemd, rather than complaining about being "forced" to use it.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#84

Post by egberts1 »

egberts1 wrote: post #83

Just this minute, I lost the kernel image after upgrading to Debian 12 Bookworm. Stuck at Lilo. "Not found". Standard Dell Optiplex 790. Time to breakout the Debian Rescue DVD. (sigh)

I am one of those few sysadmin who does not have /boot mounted at runlevel 3.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#85

Post by openmapsguy »

andrewaylett wrote: post #18
daneel_w wrote: post #6

Devuan ( https://www.devuan.org/ ) is a fork of Debian with the specific aim of removing systemd, as an alternative.

It is unfortunately trivial to argue that Devuan is without point, as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd. As, indeed, they said they allow for would when they decided to adopt it. If anything, the presence of Devuan cements systemd even more tightly into position -- those who care about not running systemd are distracted by forking an enti…

The Devuan guys are also maintaining a bunch of the non systemd packages in Debian.

And Debian says they’re fine having non systemd but any work needed to make openrc etc viable falls on the these guys.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#86

Post by dizhn »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #81
dizhn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately alpine ships with a lot of init scripts that don't work. To make it worse it ships with init scripts that could never have worked. I don't know if discovering this should make me stay away from it as a distro or send patches (which is not trivial. I tried a few times). I do like < 3 minutes full distro version upgrades though.

What's an example of an init script that could never have worked?

dcc (last year)

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#87

Post by checkyoursudo »

DaSHacka wrote: post #27
TekMol wrote: post #4

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

>major distro emerges have you tried gentoo? Really fits your requirement of 'emerges' lol They also have a pretty good page on their wiki that explains the current popular alternative init systems to systemd(0), even ones gentoo doesn't support. [0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems

I cut my teeth on OpenRC and I will die with OpenRC.

Actually, I don't really care about the init system, as far as I can tell. When I started using Gentoo, the default was OpenRC, so that is all I have ever known.

I have not the faintest idea what benefit I would get from using Systemd compared to OpenRC, so I have never tried changing. I have used Debian with Systemd, and I can't particularly tell the difference from an everyday-user perspective. I used Ubuntu a few times when I think it had upstart maybe? Again, no idea what the difference is.

All I know is that there are things I can do with the rest of Gentoo that I have not easily been able to do with other distros, so that is where I stay.

Anyway, for anyone who hates systemd for whatever reason, Gentoo is definitely an alternative. It is a little weird to me that any distro would have a hard dependency on a particular init system, when it is clearly not necessary. More work to be compatible with multiple, I guess? At the same time, I don't really understand the hate. Just ... use something else?

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#88

Post by PathfinderBot »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #13
TekMol wrote: post #4

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

It will always be a fringe effort since the vast majority of the people doing the actual work are fine with it. It's been what, ten years by now? If instead of complaining all that time systemd haters cooperated and put in the work, they could have produced something (supposedly) much better by now. Alpine is probably your best bet, it's pretty widely used. All of the others are a minority of a minority of a minority…

As per other sibling comments, there are already many efforts underway. Void Linux in particular, which I've used, has a surprising number of packages.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#89

Post by PathfinderBot »

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #56

Distrowatch's Advanced Search page: https://distrowatch.com/search.php#advanced Note that under the "Init Software" section (scroll down on page!), the following two choices (amongst numerous others, perhaps too many!) are included: [ ] systemd [ ] Not systemd In other words, here, the User, regardless of their opinion, regardless of their political ideology (or lack thereof!) -- has a happy choice ! They can choose…

Amen. The free software community is great.
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