(edit: I thought you meant looking at tiny distros to get away from systemd, as opposed to the big-name ones which pretty much all use systemd. ignore this if not)
We use OpenRC on stock Debian. After some annoying initial setup hurdles it actually works pretty well, and I don’t think it’s gonna break randomly on us.
So that might be an option, too. As long as Debian doesn’t remove the sysvinit scripts because “oh everyone’s using systemd now”…
– Frost
Honestly, they seem a lot less shitty culturally in general (less take-over-the-world-y). It’s not a guarantee, of course, but they’re probably less likely to do that.
Also (and perhaps more importantly), once you’re on any alternative init, you can move between init systems pretty easily (though you may have to rewrite any custom scripts you wrote, sysvinit scripts should be compatible with everything). It’s just the init system you’re swapping out, and not all sorts of random system stuff like systemd’s got its tentacles into.
We use OpenRC on stock Debian. It actually works pretty well, and I’m REALLY hoping it stays that way.
– Frost
It’s not about “the unix philosophy”.
It’s about how one project is trying to do more, and more, and more, and more, and trying to entrench itself as deeply as possible so you can’t just use something else if you don’t like it.
(Oh, and this new political stuff? Now there’s a concrete reason to use something else.)
The problem with systemd isn’t technical, it’s political, IMO. Oh I mean sure there’s plenty of technical reasons to hate it too (binary logs anyone?), but that’s not the main problem.
systemd would actually be pretty nice, if it stuck to just being a service manager. Unfortunately, yeah.
Oh, and everyone ALWAYS goes “oh but the only other option is a hodgepodge of scripts! you don’t want a hodgepodge of scripts! bow down and accept systemd”. Ever seen, like, any of the other init systems that are out there? We’re running OpenRC right now and it’s pretty fantastic. (Granted, sysv scripts are still the lowest common denominator, but there are other options. OpenRC’s got declarative service files too, and they’re actually way nicer than systemd’s service files when you need to break out of the declarative format and do a little script stuff. systemd made us stuff everything into one line.)
And before you dismiss me as Just Some Oldhead™, we actually moved to Linux (from Mac) well AFTER systemd was already entrenched. So this isn’t a “you hate change” thing.
– Frost
yes please! We’re using OpenRC on Debian right now, it’s very nice. Way less annoying than systemd.
– Frost
Hah, even after switching to openrc we’ve still got libsystemd0 on our system for some reason, so I bet intune would still work!
Gentoo looks pretty awesome, I’ve been thinking about trying it at some point.
– Frost