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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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[–] 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 3 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 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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 2 days 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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