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Comment by catpolice | Hacker News Reader

I used to love Arch wholeheartedly. The systemd transition left a bad taste in my mouth, and I haven't felt like I've had full control of my system since then, but I periodically try other Linux distributions but I always end up coming back to Arch. My experience with other distributions always goes something like this:

Oh this is nice and easy

Hm, there isn't a package for this thing I love. I guess I'll build it myself...

[Several hours pass]

Ok, looks like I just need to get XYZ working and I'm good, lemme google how to do that for this distro

It looks like this is automatically configured using some Windows-style control panel hidden somewhere. Google suggests seven different places I could look for this option, corresponding to previous versions of the distro...

Wouldn't editing a config in /etc/ be easier than this? I'm reinstalling Arch...

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I'm with you.

I cut my teeth on Slackware, then Debian and was a happy Arch user for years up until the systemd transition. I'm negative on it in general, but the upgrade completely borked my system. For the life of me could not find a way to recover it. And I know my way around the system...

Switched to OpenBSD and haven't looked back since. There's not all that much to tweak, mainly because I'm always in console. If I need to browse websites I can use my company issued mbp or my ipad.

Have you tried Gentoo?

I switched from Arch to Gentoo a few years ago (before systemd was on the radar). After installation, which is admittedly more involved, I found it felt much the same as Arch for day-to-day usage. And, for all the possible criticisms of Gentoo, you'll definitely feel in full control of your system.

I recently installed Artix Linux[1] (Arch with openrc) on a spare hard drive on my laptop, and although the GUI installer gave me a few issues, installing manually from the text ISO as I would normally with Arch worked flawlessly, and I've yet to run into any issues with it. I'm working up the courage to switch to it as my main driver on my desktop.

[1]: http://www.artixlinux.org

So what is the issue with systemd? Any strictly better alternative out there?

Last time I did the research there wasn't a striiiictly better alternative to systemd, which is rather unfortunate. There are flame wars beyond number on the subject and I'd rather avoid starting another one. For my two cents: I don't like how it's gobbling up all the functionality that used to be owned by separately maintained and tried/tested processes, in a way that seems to limit my ability to put together a minimalistic system, and the developers' attitude toward security and how they've handled criticism is not so great. I'll use it, but I don't like it.

For me, there are ecosystem/adoption reasons for why any alternative is a tough sell - any distro basically has to have the startup system baked into their package manager, if you're going to be able to install packages that depend on daemons, etc. So if updated package availability is a concern (and it is for me), I need a popular enough distro. And basically all the popular distros use systemd. So unless I want to make some pretty big compromises or do a ton of work, I'm stuck with it.

There are alternatives.

* https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh

You can still use OpenRC. No support, but it might work.

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