Alpine linux seems to be doing fine without systemd.
Well, maybe you would say Alpine is not intented to run heavyweight stuff like that and is mostly focused on security and containers.
That's exactly what Alpine is, the OpenBSD of Linux distros. OpenBSD likewise cannot be used as your production powerhouse as well.
Alpine runs musl libc. This makes it buggy with all sorts of software that rely on glibc-isms, that makes it incompatible with proprietary drivers like NVIDIA and make it harder to run proprietary/binary software on the userland.
musl is developed by people with that sort of break-everything attitude : https://twitter.com/RichFelker/status/994629795551031296
There is a world of pain that awaits anyone with the expectation that this sort of distro could be used on a workstation.
Musl is really meant to be run.. with software vetted by communities like https://suckless.org/
Meaning things like dwm, dmenu, st.
Which may or may not be one's cup of tea. It certainly ain't mine.
The glibc 2.26 release with the ucontext breakages made me stick with musl.
Plus, when i did multiarch support in Alpine later, i found that LDSO paths for musl are much more systematically and don't have name collisions like glibc.
There are some very unfortunate ideological choice made by its author but they are not the one you quote. The reluctance to give developers a way to detect Musl from C code would be a better exemple. It’s both annoying and counterproductive.
> Without systemd, bootstrapping a complicated desktop environment would be a hot mess
startx on tty1, i3 being launched from xinitrc. Same procedure that i use on any other distro or BSD.
What is a complicated desktop environment? Why should I run it? I want to run simple desktop environment, like Xfce. I run startx in tty, and get unprivileged Xorg with Xfce on sysvinit system. It's rock solid.
I've considered it a lot, but I'm still to attached to service activations and a few other features from systemd --user.