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Comment by pinpeliponni | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps. But then again, the RHEL people really need many of the features SystemD offers. The Ubuntu Beta people can keep running init if they must.

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The Ubuntu people, like the Fedora people, used Upstart before they switched to systemd. You make the far too common error of thinking that only systemd and System 5 init/rc exist.

* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

Upstart had some really nasty gotchas too, but at least was limited in scope. It'll be interesting to see if we ever move from CentOS to FreeBSD to get away from the horror show that is systemd.

If your applications run on FreeBSD I would make the switch, but most originations need better reasons for switching. Have you ever had downtime associated with Systemd or Missed deadlines? Thats the only way I could think of that might justify the switch.

Honest question: I'm not familiar with FreeBSD, what init system does it use and why isn't it a horror?

FreeBSD uses FreeBSD init and Mewburn rc. Mewburn rc is somewhat different to van Smoorenburg rc. It has a huge library of standard shell script functions, and the actual rc files that ship with the operating system, and accompany packages, sometimes boil down to a few shell variable assignments and then an invocation of one of the shell library functions that does everything. This is not universally the case, however, and there are some giant exceptions.

Now read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550802 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357589 . (The mentioned van Smoorenburg rc script has since moved to https://github.com/dun/conman/blob/master/etc/conman.init.in .)

The TrueOS people have replaced Mewburn rc with OpenRC, retaining the FreeBSD init as far as I am aware. I suggested to them back in January 2017 that since OpenRC has s6 integration, they might do well to add s6 to that to gain full service management. I never received a reply. I haven't heard that Laurent Bercot was contacted, either.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13458186

* http://www.mail-archive.com/supervision@list.skarnet.org/msg...

I personally use the nosh system and service managers on FreeBSD and TrueOS, of course. I released version 1.34 last week.

The biggest advantage is that its init system is just an init system. Systemd is so far beyond the scope of an init system it's not even funny.

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