Short answer: if you’re asking this, then it’s not worth it.
Long answer: Ditching systemd in favor of something else is usually an act of experimentation. Folks that do it usually have had a negative experience with systemd, be it in its usage or from a problem they had that prevented them to boot their computers due to the tightly-coupled relationship between mainstream distros and systemd.
Also, preference is involved here, so you might prefer to assemble your system with independent pieces instead of a full-blown suite like systemd’s. You might also not like systemd’s UX so, as a user, you end up wanting to try something else.
If you have to ask, the benefits of another init system than systemd starts and stops at “you look smart.” I like runit a lot and would even recommend Void Linux as a daily driver if that’s your speed, but honestly anyone who actually was around before systemd knew how much sysvinit and co sucked.
This or artixlinux.org are the only options which come to mind and make some form of sense.
If you are willing to learn more about linux, I think its a good practice to try a distro with a different init system than d. Thats one of the reasons I have void linux on my home laptop.
I say this as someone who doesn’t use systemd. There’s not much benefit to it. It’s cool to do if you’re an enthusiast or experimentalist, but from a practical stand point, systemd is most practical.
Is the experience of trying new distros very cool? yes
Should you abandon systemd? no
systemd is not bloated and it’s not insecure. If you don’t have any problems, don’t switch (unless you wanna have some fun trying new things, if you do, run a vm).
Not sure about the security, but recently I’ve tried runit on a very old laptop with HDD and it took waaay much less to fully boot up than a clean Arch32 with systemd
Systemd is a large piece of software. There are ways to make it smaller and disable various modules for it, but usually by default it’s very heavy.
With a traditional init system, it’s just an init system, and you’ll use other other programs to do the other things. This basically means a chain of interconnected bash scripts. Perhaps you’ll run into some integration issues. Probably not though. It’ll be mostly the same.
There is no real advantage to this from a user perspective beyond a philosophical one. Systemd works quite well at doing the things it tries to do, but it’s the Unix philosophy to “do one thing and do it well,” and some people care very deeply that systemd does not follow their interpretation of that philosophy, and that’s certainly a fair reason to not use it.
However, if you’re not having problems with using systemd, I’d say don’t bother switching.
Systems is not the Unix philosophy, at least, not to me. It tries to handle so many different things and use cases. “One thing” normally means a small thing, and initialising everything you could ever think of is not a small thing.
Basically, if you do not see any reason to switch from systemd then you should not. The thing with systemd is that it is really big and complicated. If you just use defaults of your distro systemd works just fine, but if you want to (or have to) change something fundamental, then dealing with this monstrosity becomes a bit of pain. You basically end with the situation where you are in a war with your own PC. After some time of this, dealing with an init system that does exactly what you tell it to do feels refreshing. There is also the part, where some init systems (sysVinit and runit) boot faster then others (openRC and systemd), but it is not that significant. I use runit BTW. With my setup I spend much less time dealing with runit then I used to with systemd. That being said I still miss some of systemd features.
As someone who’ve tried Gentoo on systemd and OpenRC, as well as Void with runit, I don’t see any reason to use OpenRC over systemd. I never noticed any performance difference, and it has far less features. As for runit, if half the boot time for half the features is what you need, then go for it.
Systemd vs anything else is mostly controversy, the outlet of a bunch of people that don’t want Linux to evolve, become better and have more flexibility because it violates the UNIX philosophy and/or it is backed by big corp. Systemd was made to tackle a bunch of issues with poorly integrated tools and old architectures that aren’t as good as they used to be. If you look at other operating systems. Even Apple has a better service manager (launchd) than what Linux had with init and friends.
Systemd is incredibly versatile and most people are unaware of its full potential. Apart from the obvious - start services - it can also run most of a base system with features such as networking (IPv4+IPV6, PBR), NTP, Timers (cron replacement), secure DNS resolutions, isolate processes, setup basic firewalls, port forwarding, centralize logging (in an easy way to query and read), monitor and restart services, detect hardware changes and react to them, mount filesystems, listen for connections in sockets and launch programs to handle incoming data, become your bootloader and… even run full fledged containers both privileged and non-privileged containers. Read this for more details: tadeubento.com/…/systemd-hidden-gems-for-a-better…
The question isn’t “what is the benefit of removing this init system”, it is “what I’ll be missing if I remove it”. Although it is possible to do all the above without Systemd, you’ll end up with a lot of small integration pains and dozens of processes and different tools all wasting resources.
This enables the user to select how much (or little) of systemd is used on their system. It’s also one of the few distros that enables you to switch init systems on a running system if you really want to.
Yes, I wrote the article as a collections of thoughts and links of what I’ve learn about systemd over the years. The reality is that when Debian moved to systemd I wasn’t that happy but after learning all it can do and the way it works I see it was the best move.
I would be interested in using a distro that uses only systemd for everything(preferably arch based). Is there such a distro? I know it can be done manually,but I lack the time or patience to do it at this time.
TBH I like Debian, but am used to Arch and plasma. I like the fact that Debian sticks to default DEs with no customizations. If I ever get tired of Arch (probably not) Debian is next on the list.
That list of “features” never needed to be replaced by systemd and for the most part are provided by the other init offerings.
As for logging you may find yourself one with a system using systemd that has faced an error and cannot boot good luck reading the binary journal it makes, yes these entries can be pushed out to text file or syslog but if systemd falls over hard it will log to the default binary journal and you’ll need to use another install with systemd to run journalctl --file /path/to/mounted/journal which in an emergency is a true PITA.
It is not an outlet for those who you choose to espouse as “People who don’t want linux to evolve” far from it most of them just want systemd to stop trying to replace things that are not broken and for other projects to stop having it as a hard dependency. Yes it is modular, yes these can be disabled but it has so many tentacles that it is clear the intentions are wider than just being an init.
If you want a basic bootloader your UEFI has one built in and/or you can boot the kernel directly with efistub, systemd-boot is so basic it’s pointless to the point that an unconfigured install of refind is a truckload better.
I get that this is a hot topic but waaay too many people are just adding pointless opinion and toxic opinion into this debate that doesn’t help anyone make what they want is a decent informed choice and tbh when I see Gnome make a hard dependency of systemd it makes me think either systemd is doing too much, is not modular enough, devs got lazy or all of the above.
And a final FYI I use systemd and have disabled much of it but can’t uninstall the parts I don’t need/want.
That list of “features” never needed to be replaced by systemd and for the most part are provided by the other init offerings.
This is plain wrong. Init wasn’t able to properly start things in parallel and monitor them. With systemd you can even create a visual representation graph of your boot services that you can use to identify what is taking more time and when things are happening.
What’s wrong? Too many tools, way too fragmented and poorly integrated. It is very, very easy to get into trouble if you simply setup a dual stack system with IPv6-PD with those tools. With systemd it all works of the box with simples configuration files and its way more intuitive. For eg. cron is a mess, systemd timers share the unit config format which is way better and more scalable.
I use systemd and have disabled much of it
So you are saying you could just have a very small footprint and have a very lightweight system that is very solid but instead of choose to go with a bunch of different tools? I’ve leveraged systemd to be able to have fully working system on devices with 256MB of RAM while still having RAM for other important applications.
As you can see many have the ability to start services in parallel. Some script magic with graphviz will also do similar to analyse blame.
What’s wrong? Too many tools, way too fragmented and poorly integrated. It is very, very easy to get into trouble if you simply setup a dual stack system with IPv6-PD with those tools. With systemd it all works of the box with simples configuration files and its way more intuitive. For eg. cron is a mess, systemd timers share the unit config format which is way better and more scalable.
Do you honestly beloved thie mental gymnastics your getting into just to prove your point, go back to windows. Lol
Well done on using systemd how you wish, now move on and let others use it how they wish or remove it.
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