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Comment by hackcasual | Hacker News Reader

OpenRC predates systemd I believe

It's also not a complete alternative, because it doesn't have anything for user session services like `systemd --user`. I use postmarketOS which is based on Alpine which uses OpenRC, and desktop session daemons currently have to be started by the compositor via XDG autostart files. So services start fine but they're not restarted if they crash, they have ad-hoc logging, etc.

One of the pmOS devs wrote a user session service manager [1] but pmOS doesn't use it (yet?). And Alpine as a whole is planning on moving away from OpenRC anyway.

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~craftyguy/superd

Oh, what is Alpine planning to move to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36496431

> It's also not a complete alternative, because it doesn't have anything for user session services like `systemd --user`.

i am working on a implementation of that for openrc for a while now, it's been working nicely so far: https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc/pull/573

Enjoy https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/per-user-dbus-demand-s... and https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/dbus-daemon-l... .

There is work being done to add user sessions to openrc by some person. It seems pretty cool so far!

I'm not totally sure whether openrc will merge this or not, but I would definitely like to see this be added.

edit: They actually seem to have replied to you while I was writing the original comment.

It really seems strange to me that postmarketOS does not use systemd, given how its too main usecases (mobile use as well as server use of repurposed devices) would certainly benefit from a mature service manager. Possibly even if they had to put it on top of Alpine themselves.

pmOS has no intention of moving off of Alpine base, and systemd is still incompatible with musl (or vice versa, depending on which side you're on in the arguement :) ), and OpenRC works well enough for now.

That doesn't mean its initial design didn't learn from the mistakes systemd made.

How could that be possible if it predates systemd?

systemd repeats a lot of mistakes that systems prior to openrc made, and that openrc avoided.

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