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This looks right up my alley. I am experimenting to see how much I can strip systemd from my every day laptop as an exercise in futility and to understand how embedded a distribution like Debian has become.

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I stopped trying to swim against the current and switched to OpenBSD/FreeBSD. You might be surprised how viable it really is.

It’s really a shame that OpenBSD doesn’t have a good file system. Otherwise I’d use for my production systems (I could put it inside of proxmox, with a ZFS container outside for stability inside, but I like to run bare metal, no VMs)

I tried to install OpenBSD on three VM hosts, one Macbook Intel, one FreeBSD and one KVM. OpenBSD failed to install in all three environments. The latter two crashed just during the file system creation stage.

Slackware is also systemd free.

http://www.slackware.com/

I think Alpine would be a smaller jump?

Yes, Alpine is a good choice for small servers. I run both FreeBSD and Alpine for my homelab. Alpine feels very close to FreeBSD style. I still prefer pf over ufw/awall.

That’s my concern, the Debian experience is usually pretty lovely and I’d hate to leave it behind, but maybe there’s no point in fiddling with something stuck in trends.

https://www.devuan.org/

I run Void Linux on my laptop, which seems to exhibit many BSD-esque approaches (and lacks systemd), while also being a rolling release distro with fresh stuff usually appearing in a few days after an upstream release.

Pretty fine so far (about 6 years).

That's the spirit!

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/antix-23-1_init-dive...

Seems that it even saves power, in spite of using that gaming/latency-optimized kernel from Pika-OS.

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