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Comment by xarthna | Hacker News Reader

I used systemd for a time, and after looking into all the documentation I found it hard to understand and it's scope overreaching. It doesn't stand by the unix philosophy of mechanism not policy and is prescriptive in it's inplementation. As another comment stated, the politics behind how it was pushed never sat right with me and I believe it is leading the Linux community to vendor lock in.

I have been using s6 on Artix and find it a great init system and service manager with a clear cut design goal of knowing where to stop. It does what it is supposed to do and no more - by design. It doesn't have the user friendly interface of systemctl but that is being currently worked on. If one is looking for an alternative to systemd, I think it is an excellent option to consider.

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Another happy s6 user here, and pretty much for the same reasons. I like the clear supervision process tree it creates. I'm not sold on the execline syntax, but it's relatively clean and easy to work with and since I already use a configuration management system, generating custom startup files (from a single template) isn't that much of a challenge.

I'm currently exploring how to generate minimal service environments from Guix package manifests. Being able to spawn svscan as a child under the root supervision tree means I can create each environment with its own service directory, and never worry about cross-contamination from whatever else is on the host.

I'm glad to hear it. I find s6 extremely stable. I've learned to come around on execline and have been converting bash scripts to it when I have the thought. The idea of it makes sense (to not load a heavy shell when kicking off a service and chain loading programs for small footprint).

I _think_ I did something similar to what you mention, though I'm not familiar with guix. Analogous to systems, what I _did_ like about systemd was the user level service management. So I essentially kick off a user privileged supervision tree for my session with s6 with its own scandir and service db when launching X. It is not under the root supervision tree but lives side by side at this moment since 1) I wasn't aware of s6-usertree-maker at the time and 2) i wanted any user to be able to kick off user privileged services without root intervention (e.g. setting up usertree-maker)

Any distro with s6 as default init manager?

I'm not sure of any distros that have default s6, but Artix[1] allows you to pick your init/service manager. It is what I used and I am very happy with it.

[1] https://artixlinux.org/

Alpine is working on it: https://skarnet.com/projects/service-manager.html

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