Devuan 4.0 Released As Debian 11 Without Systemd

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Devuan 4.0 Released As Debian 11 Without Systemd

Devuan 4.0 "Chimaera" is officially out today as the latest stable release of this Linux distribution known for being a close rebuild of Debian but without a dependence on systemd...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...n-4.0-Released

[tildearrow]

Init freedom... why can't I pick systemd? ;p

[Alexmitter]

If you hate yourself, if you want to suffer, you use a distro without systemd.
Of all the "questionable" things we discuss so heated in the community. systemd is the one that is by far the best software, and the arguments get the most esoteric until they turn into a personal issue with its original author.

[stop5]

Init freedom... why is systemd not a choice? ;p

Because some things use exclusive systemd stuff, like socket activation or running with capabilities as non privileged users or user services. There are many features of systemd that can't be easily achieved with other systems.
For example: can you run a program at the last day of the month at midnight UTC, but if someone started it before, it should not start again?
systemd can achieve this without writing complicated error prone shellscripts.

[gQuigs]

If you hate yourself, if you want to suffer, you use a distro without systemd.
Of all the "questionable" things we discuss so heated in the community. systemd is the one that is by far the best software, and the arguments get the most esoteric until they turn into a personal issue with its original author.

Couldn't agree more. Systemd is awesome.

[wertigon]

I am one of those people sceptical about systemd, but even I agree it is a great piece of software for the most part.

I dislike some parts, like how systemd eats up traditional separate services like pamd, logind and init, and make them a monolithic service. I also dislike how systemd offers virtually no cooperation with said services, it is pretty much systemd or nothing.

This is why I an hoping Devuan eventually develops systemd 2.0 which does what systemd does in a much less invasive way, but not really holding my breath for it anytime soon.

[er888kh]

Couldn't agree more. Systemd is awesome.

Same. It really makes one's life easier. Though having an alternative is always good, it motivates devs to implement more features and better ways to achieve the same task.

[squash]

I think it's fair to say that systemd does what systemd does fairly well, but that was never the argument. The argument was more "What functions are appropriate for init(1)?"

Starting and stopping services? Obviously.

Managing your DNS resolution? Ehhhhhh

Replacing syslog with your own binary log format and tools to access and manage them? Well now we're just being silly.

Like, it's all well and good that all these utilities exist, but many of them seem to be solving problems that didn't exist.

[gQuigs]

I think it's fair to say that systemd does what systemd does fairly well, but that was never the argument. The argument was more "What functions are appropriate for init(1)?"

The other bits are mostly separate from PID1..

The argument against is why include everything in the same project, but that's also why I like systemd. That allows me to have a consistent and integrated experience to do most of the basic things I want to do.

I also don't mean to take away from Devuan's work - competition can be good.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I think it's fair to say that systemd does what systemd does fairly well, but that was never the argument. The argument was more "What functions are appropriate for init(1)?"

Starting and stopping services? Obviously.

Managing your DNS resolution? Ehhhhhh

Replacing syslog with your own binary log format and tools to access and manage them? Well now we're just being silly.

Like, it's all well and good that all these utilities exist, but many of them seem to be solving problems that didn't exist.

I get the philosophical hate for it around doing too much and binary logs being a sin, but has it been an improvement in the real world? When I was investigating a gnome shell extension crash after a resume from a screen blank, it was actually quite easy to get details out of journalctl. For many users, I'm not sure they would even know where to start investigating a similar problem without systemd and random logs for different pieces of the puzzle all over the place.