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Why do you use a systemd-less distro (if you do)? (programming.dev)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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I'm curious to know why people use systemd-less distributions. Which one would you recommend to someone who wants to stop using systemd?

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[–] 13 points 4 days ago (5 children)

The main argument I hear is about portability. Systemd integrates deeply with Linux and isn’t available on BSDs or other Unix-like systems. This in itself wouldn’t be an issue but major desktop software started to integrate systemd locking out BSD users. A recent example is KDE Plasma Login Manager (KDE itself still works).

Providing systemd-less option is something very in line with Gentoo Linux portability goals so I’d take a look at what they do if you’re interested.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    Out of interest: Which init system is used on several OSes by default? Last I checked all OSes wanted init systems that made actual use of their unique kernel features. Any POSIX compliant init tool will by definition not support OS specific features out of the box. Maybe you can hack them on?

    I see this "they depend on systemd-specific features": Of course. The systemd project listens when user space developers report the probpems they face with their problems and tries to solve them. Of course developers are going to use that, why would they want to hack around a problem poorly instead of using a proper solution that is more stable, robust and has seen way more testing than anything they could write themselves? The problem is not systemd here, its nobody else bothering to do something.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    I don’t think there’s one. Gentoo OpenRC was created with FreeBSD and NetBSD in mind but hasn’t really been adopted beyond Linux. It feels more like it’s an effort to keep recipes for having Linux run without systemd and to monitor cases where systemd integration breaks things for other init systems. Having only one good option means being one option away from having no good options at all.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    So why bother about making init tools portable? You end up with a tool that works poorly on all OSes and nobody needs more of that.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 child)

    Even if OpenRC is not widely adopted it is a commitment from Gentoo to build their package recipes in a way that’s portable across different init systems. Keeping options open is healthy and I think one of the coolest things about Linux ecosystem historically was that there were at least two non-halfassed options for most of the system components. This also helps out little guys like BSDs who benefit from portability issues Gentoo package maintainers raise upstream.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago*

    IMHO supporting several init tools does more harm than good to any distribution. Its a lot of extra effort that few users will even notice.

    Traditionally we used a script to boot. Those of course looked different in each distribution, but the "init tool" was the same. Then we switched over to sysv init (and man did people complain about this overcomplicated mess of symlinks!), yet pretty much all distributions switched to that. Of course they shipped widely different init scripts, but the tool was pretty much the same everywhere. The Linux Standard Base even prescribed the sysv init and any compliant distribution had to use that. We never had a time where distributions offered options wrt. init tooling.

    I doubt the portability issue reporting from gentoo makes any difference whatsoever for the BSDs. They come up with all kinds of Linux compatibility stuff and that gets them the software they want.

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