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Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

How exactly do you avoid it? It spread like the plague in almost every Linux distribution. The only way to avoid it is by running BSD, Slackware or one of those one man show Linux distributions.

I have issues with apache not being restarted by systemd for obscure DNS resolving reasons.

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On Debian:

  apt-get install sysvinit-core systemd-sysv-
  reboot

To prevent it from coming back, create the file /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-systemd.pref containing:

  Package: systemd-sysv
  Pin: origin *
  Pin-Priority: -1

This works great on servers and lightweight desktops. However, GNOME has a dependency on systemd-as-PID1. In theory you can install systemd-shim to emulate the needed functionality, but I don't know how well it works.

And what is the likelihood that this will still be a thing in the next major update, or the one after that?

I'm not aware of any changes in the next release that would prevent this from working.

In 2014, the project voted on whether packages could require a specific init system. My read of the results[1] is that a significant minority of the project thinks users should be able to choose their own init system.

[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/suppl_003_stats

Gentoo is none of those, although the main "idea" of Gentoo - the compilation - scares a lot of people away. Suffice it to say that I was somewhat against Gentoo until I put it on an old, failing desktop - it absolutely purrs.

If you stick with a tiling WM and don't install GNOME/KDE/whatever, the compilation is far from being a persistent problem, and I say this as someone on a usually <1 Mbps Indian internet connection. (Except for Firefox, that is. But you can get a binary package for that.) I do worry about unfixable package management trouble in the future, though...

It's a pain to maintain a server where you have to compile everything. FreeBSD used to do that a while ago but now with the new pkg it's not the case anymore - you have new prebuilt packages every quarter. So I would use that rather than Gentoo, but my employer deploys on OpenSuSE.

On apt-based systems, you can pin it oblivion. This will prevent systemd, or any software which depends on it, from being installed.

There are some cases of non-systemd-specific packages which are affected, though in my experience, anything brain-dead enough to rely exclusively on systemd is best avoided (GNOME seems most affected).

There are several alternative init systems.

Debian and Ubuntu can be treated in this way, along with derivatives. Slack and Gentoo as well as I recall. I've given consideration to BSDs, but much prefer GNU userland (and yes, I know that's an option).

I'm hoping Red Hat collapses and/or Linux generally comes to its collective senses.

Won't fix much unless the package maintainers have set up parallel trees of packages, or a whole bunch of "masking tape" so that packages don't care as long as the "has a init" package comes up green.

As systemd has in large part been adopted over a manpower issue, expect the ability to opt out via pinning to vanish soon enough.

In most cases, this exists.

I'm profoundly disappointed in Debian's decision, but one consequence may be that the worse elements of systemd's design are in fact abstracted out. There are several shim frameworks which can provide systemd-like capabilities, where required, without the full stack being required. On alternate Debian kernels (BSD and Hurd are both targets), this is required due to systemd's own dependencies on the Linux kernel itself.

To a large extent, systemd has taken the joy out of using Linux, and sunk my trust in both kernel and distro development.

I could have sworn that Debian had retired those alternate kernel targets because of systemd, and that the variouys shims are struggling to keep up with systemd changes (logind being particularly problematic).

Nope. BSD and, as an experimental project, HURD.

https://www.debian.org/intro/about

Gentoo lets you choose. The default is openRC though.

Well, too bad openRC was not chosen when Debian picked an init system. I really wished they would chose openRC instead, but no. It has an /etc/rc.conf just like BSD's rc.subr. Devuan wasn't working the last time I tried to install it, maybe that will change in a while. The prospect of a Debian fork with openRC (even if it's optional) sounds pretty nice.

alpine linux uses openrc too, which is the default for docker images.

Sadly their current OpenRC maintainer is hell bent on introducing ever more systemd-isms into OpenRC.

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