Hacker News Reader

Comment by miffe | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of a systemd-free distro?

Personally, I will never go back to writing startup scripts again.

The alternative to systemd is not startup scripts. There are smart service managers that do not try to take over your entire system. s6 is a good example.

How many times a day/week/month do you have to setup services on your computers?

I tried artix (not antix) archlinux systemdless based distro mostly out of curiosity a few weeks ago as I wanted to repurpose an old computer. I was also curious of systemd's memory overhead as I've seen report of people running a base kde with little memory usage on slackware compared to other distros. Turns out that writing a service definition for runit is even less complicated than for systemd. It might not be as flexible though but I didn't reach the point when I needed those options yet.

So for now I am living happily without systemd in at least one computer at my home and my quality of life hasn't changed at all, it just remembers me it is different the few times I type systemctl or journalctl out of habit.

Been using NixOS for a while now. It's heavily systemd oriented, and it also makes adding and configuring systemd-based services and jobs a breeze. I find myself doing it multiple times a week.

Same here. I do not have any opinion towards systemd, but using it together with NixOS is really simple and hassle-free.

What I meant is that in most case, the service you need are already configure and come with the packages of the distro and the only thing you do is enabling and starting them.

Which is not more difficult with runit than systemd and it is probably the same for dinit or openrc.

I mean systemd is still great, it allow a regular unprivileged user to create services and timers without having admin access, which is really nice to launch automatically some podman containers for example. But this is a niche use case and mostly limited to dev/sysadmins.

How did the memory usage comparison pan out?

Hard to say immediately as I am running it with sddm + sway so it can be lightweight.

I can boot up another laptop and configure it to use sddm + sway to compare in a couple minutes.

I think the point is one less giant blob of technically open, but extremely obfuscated chunk of questionable usefulness on your system.

I'm not sure about you, but I've used many distros, with and without systemd, and never had to write a startup script. The package manager takes care of it (or I switch to a different distro.)

The point is less mess & hassle freeness. And the ability to load it into RAM, and have it running from there, without effort, because it was made with that use-case in mind, among others.

$ uptime 07:21:39 up 128 days, 21:23, 3 users, load average: 0.38, 0.54, 0.60

The above is MX-Linux actually, but doesn't really matter, because they use the same framework, and the default image contains more stuff, while Antix is more 'spartan'.

What's with the uptime stats? Recently I had a systemd based server with two years of uptime. Nothing to be proud of, though, because obviously I missed to install a lot of kernel updates.

Yeah, got a point there. I just posted that to confirm the 'messlessness' :-)

As in having booted the image into ram, chosen a few menu-items via function keys, and having worked from there. Without having to edit any 'scripts', btw.

As desktop. While not having updated the kernel, it got updates for the layers above, though. Anyways, it just works for me.

(Shrug)

Healthy competition between modern init systems: runit, openrc, s6, systemd... This choice should be yours when you install a system.

Just like you wouldn't want to have no choice for your desktop environment (why would anyone not want GNOME?), widgets, toolkits and libraries.

Choice, modularity and competition between subsystems and libraries is what makes Linux an open, innovative environment.

Right and every package will need to have init configs for all the systems. Are you high?

This is how it's already done on Devuan.

https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom

https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation/install-guides/chima... (older screenshot)

Or what's the point of having another systemd-free Debian distro when there's already Devuan?

What's the point in having another systemd distro when there's already Red Hat Inc? /s

The point is these are companies like Red Hat and Suse that "naturally" compete. Free software communities working on Linux distributions would be better off to join their forces. Just my opinion, though, of course they are free to do what they want as I am free to express my opinion on the matter.

AntiX already works together with MX Linux. But to answer your point, cooperation is independent of distros.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com