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Comment by mpol | Hacker News Reader

Is Devuan still having a usecase? No offense, I am simply curious. Lately I see statements that you can use standard Debian and have it instaled without systemd. It won't be the default I assume, but how do Devuan and Debian (without systemd) compare nowadays?

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Since the change, you could always use debian without systemd. It was trivial, especially for servers.

Desktops took more care, but that was still a non-issue.

But lately, especially since bookworm, things are less solid. rsyslogd is not a default install item now, and when you install it, there is no init script.

This is fine for servers which want centralized logging under systemd, because of course it can start syslog with the included unit file.

But if you remove systemd, by default you have no logging daemon, and once installed, no init script by default.

Easy to fix, but a reduced ease of use.

> rsyslogd is not a default install item now, and when you install it, there is no init script.

It’s in the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package.

What a strange place to put it, there's loads of sysinit scripts still, but thanks for the heads up.

Re: other response...

None of those things require systemd under debian, and it's easy to use sysvinit. I run loads of systems without systemd.

> What a strange place to put it, there's loads of sysinit scripts still

Well, apparently the rsyslog daemon itself does not include a sysvinit script; i.e. the rsyslog developers did not write or supply one. So it falls to the distribution, in this case Debian, packager to supply such a script. The Debian packager for the rsyslog package has chosen not to do the work of maintaining a sysvinit script. Debian has further chosen not to require sysvinit scripts for every package. Since maintaining a package is volunteer work, nobody could reasonably expect packagers to do work they don’t want to do which is not required. And thus the rsyslog package does not contain a sysvinit script.

The sysvinit scripts which used to be present in many Debian packages but which the corresponding packagers have chosen to not maintain, are still offered in the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package. The sysvinit-core package “recommends” (a Debian packaging term) the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package, which means that everybody who installs the sysvinit-core package should get the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package installed by default.

To my knowledge, this is not trivial (maybe not even possible now). there are simply too many packages that now define systemd as a requirement, like udev, dbus, etc.

If you want a systemd-free Debian, then Devuan is your go-to.

Yes, apart from being systemd free per default, it is backed by a nice community.

Also Debian having the possibility of providing systemd alternatives now, doesn't guarantee that this will be so forever. My personal guess is that at one point, systemd will be the only de-facto working init for desktop systems on Debian.

Of course it has a use-case. The target audience may be small but for them it is important.

For the other 9X%, the world has moved on

It is systemd free BY DEFAULT ... which does change EVERYTHING

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