Devuan – Debian Without Systemd • Hacker News Board

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#91

Post by t43562 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #75

egorfine wrote: post #19

As a passionate systemd hater I still will not go back to using older bash-based initsystems and thus devuan. I strongly believe that systemd brand is a worst thing that happened to Linux, hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space, but at the same time I have to admit that systemd-as-pid1 is the best init system out there.

if other systems had actual good idea about how to do pid 1, they'd be used. Systemd despise its issues solved a lot of problems. There were many before but most just aimed to be slightly less shit sysv. The problem of systemd was the fact Lennart Poettering is smartest person in the universe and why the smartest person in the universe would bother to listen to feedback of any lesser beings ?

Other systems are getting used. They're just not getting adopted by the major distributions ...presumably because they've decided that conformity helps.

But I'm happily not using systemd and it's not something that causes me any particular trouble.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#92

Post by t43562 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

Crontab wrote: post #42

I have to admit to still having some philosophical discomfort over SystemD as I feel that it encompasses too much functionality. That said, it does work and that is probably the most important thing.

There are other things just work too.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#93

Post by account42 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

Yizahi wrote: post #76

bandrami wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legible, discoverable, debuggable. They listed the commands the computer needed to run, in the order it needed to run them, to get the system running. It was absolutely beautiful. And then LSB came along and broke it, and as a result of that systemd now manages my home directory and cron tables. Shame, really.

Systems were simpler then and demands were lower. So what if the system boots sequentially and takes two days to boot up. But try to make it parallel and faster, and the whole house of scripts falls down or becomes illegible, undiscoverable and completely unmaintainable mess.

My system is still simple and I still don't have whatever requirements SystemD is needed for.

OpenRC does support parallel startup but for a desktop it's already fast enough without it - my whole Linux bootup sequence is faster than BIOS POST.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#94

Post by cbolton » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #60

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

I don't care: I can administer with relatively high confidence any Redhat- or Debian-derivate. Thanks to systems. Most issues regarding systemd I encountered were due to a halfway adoption (Debian). Some things like timers are a bit more cumbersome than "the old way", but I wouldn't want to miss the added robustness. Most things systemd implements lead to _less_ issues. And writing a systemd unit is pretty easy, cont…

you can use and like and still complain about things that should be better or were better under old. systemd solved a ton of headaches but also added few more, like inability to express "just shut the fucking system down, you won't have power in 5 minutes" for servers connected to UPS. > And writing a systemd unit is pretty easy, contrary to the old bash script mess. We had thousands of lines of "simple" sysv init sc…

> inability to express "just shut the fucking system down, you won't have power in 5 minutes" for servers connected to UPS.

What about "systemctl --force --force poweroff" ?

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#95

Post by Wilya » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

dashzebra wrote: post #25

Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?

In 2015, systemd was a giant, immature and complex galaxy of tools, that came to replace a hacky-but-mostly-stable bunch of shell scripts. It was pushed fast. It came with good ideas and innovations. It also came with security issues, bugs, and lost productivity.

The fact that the main guy behind the project has a very... abrasive personality, and that the project got to widespread adoption through political moves more than through technical superiority, turned that dislike into hate.

But it's 2025 now, systemd has stabilized now, and I don't really see the point of all this anymore.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#96

Post by t43562 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:21 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #31

Why though? Systemd has been a huge success, dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the modern world.

It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. Binary logs are a sort of example of the attitude it has. That's why there has been kicking and screaming that you mention.

I have lots of 30-year old books on "Modern XXX" which makes you realise that the label is a bit meaningless. To put it another way, there are 30 year old operating systems with a much more "modern" design than Linux has...and we're not using them. It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#97

Post by JCattheATM » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

Devuan is my go to if I need a mainline distro without systemd, but honestly I just use Alpine for everything, even my desktop. People have this idea that it's only for containers, but that isn't so - its package library has everything you could need well maintained. I like the tools better than void, and prefer the release model to that of Artix/Arch.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#98

Post by JCattheATM » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #85

account42 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace extend extinguish tactics, now celebrated in Linux land.

You had choices before, you still have choices, how is that EEE? There never been more distributions available.

You had choices not to use $technology that Microsoft embraced, extended and then extinguished, how is that not EEE?

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#99

Post by account42 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:44 PM UTC

remix2000 wrote: post #7

"Tricycle – Car Without Engine" Honestly though, the argument against systemd is that it moves too much stuff into init, but I don't think it does enough of that, it's still extremely conservative, like, SD-DBus should be using binder x-port IMO.

No, one complaint (out of many) against SystemD is that it moves too much complexity into PID 0 which is a very special process on Linux that must not crash ever or the whole system goes down with it. The init system is one thing that SystemD insists on running under PID 0 even though it could be designed otherwise.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#100

Post by egorfine » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #71

blueflow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alternate libc's like musl. the eglibc controversy showed this was necessary but poettering initially refused to support a "non-useful libc". his words.

But musl exists today? And even I use it from time to time, mostly I think in Alpine Linux. How was musl hindered if we can use it? Maybe it isn't as popular as you would have wanted, but I don't think that's the same as claiming it's been hindered by systemd.

> But musl exists today

Yes and the systemd crowd wants to embrace and extinguish it as well [1]

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS