I’m curious to know why people use systemd-less distributions. Which one would you recommend to someone who wants to stop using systemd?
I’m curious to know why people use systemd-less distributions. Which one would you recommend to someone who wants to stop using systemd?
To be fair, there is no reason for a standard user to not to use systemd. You can easily find tutorials when you need them, which won’t be a lot for your daily usage.
I switched to a systemd-less distro because I want simplicity and want every service on my system to be in my control. I cannot use systemd without copy-paste commands. With runit everything is simple.
Note that, some programs specifically check for systemd and for those you might need to adjust things accordingly, if you want to use an init system other than systemd. So again, if you don’t want to deal with init systems, systemd just works.
I use Void Linux. It has runit and it’s simple. If you want things kinda old-school there are distros that use OpenRC. There are a lot of init systems in the wild and that is a good thing, though you might find some of them quite barebones.
So if you want more control, why not? Just be ready to learn more things because systemd has more than what an init system do.
You get less control actually. Like you can’t even do basic things (capabilities per daemon, limits per daemon, isolation, etc.) with old-school inits. Won’t even start on security features allowed to units by systemd.
If by control you mean you can write your own logic in an initscript, then yes you probably can, but it’s still limited (never tried runit, but on old rhels and debian they were) by other tooling that expects script to behave in a particular way. You can still obviously do it with systemd by calling your script.
If you mean by abilities, I agree. Most of the tuning that exist on systemd doesn’t exist for runit, at least out of the box or to my knowledge. However what I meant is, with systemd I don’t know what’s going on on my system, with runit I know every single service because I put them there in the first place. Of course systemd covers most of the things nowadays, while I have to deal with power management, networking, display manager, login manager etc all separately. Doing the Unix way is simple, while systemd grew to be quite complex.
For my daily usage it suffices. For my home server, I still prefer Debian with systemd (though I’m checking Alpine nowadays) because I’m lazy for that case and systemd does everything for me.
Systemd is unix-way, systemd the manager is one program it comes with journal, but everything else under systemd project is either optional or separate utility that designed to work well with other utilities under systemd project, kind of like coreutils.
I understand your position I think it’s empowering to do it your way. 👍🏽
Heh, there is a joke running as “systemdOS”, they have too many optional utilities. :)
Thanks! I think I like simpler inits because I started using Linux before systemd (mostly OpenRC or SysVinit for me those days, but even though I used Ubuntu for quite some time I don’t really know about Upstart).
I too have started using linux some time before systemd adoption, but because my work involved a lot of system administration and infrastructure administration simplicity of sysv-style and bsd-style inits was detrimental to my mental health, so when systemd came it was something from another world, tickled me just right and documentation was insanely good and detailed, and it absolutely changed everything. There is also an obvious problem of people reductively thinking of systemd project as a whole as an init system, it isn’t just that it’s a system management system and it works great. Other systems just doesn’t use what linux provides and instead reiterate on old designs.
Yeah, I agree systemd makes things easier for sysadmins, and with every components of it to be fair. It’s quite a huge project at this point, does way more things than a mere init system, I guess that’s the argument of it being not so Unix-like. It’s made specifically for Linux so it probably doesn’t work on BSDs, though I have no idea honestly. Wayland was suppose to be the same and it works on some BSDs now apparently. Anyway, if I imagine system administration on bigscale, I think I would go with systemd as well.