[ale] Distro without systemd

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 10 May 2017 18:38:42 -0400
Joe Morris <jolomo at panix.com> wrote:

> Hey,
> There was a discussion here a few days ago about systemd. I don't
> have a religious opinion about it but I also don't want to play
> sysadmin at home. Like, ever.
> 
> Long story short, ran into a problem on my cheap Dell laptop running
> CentOS that, while systemd was only the partial culprit it obscured
> the more serious problem to the point that I'd just as soon never see
> that on a personal, one-off system again.
> 
> It's fine when I'm spinning up 200 virtual instances, configuring
> with automation and destroy and create whenever I want but not my
> home box. Where I save all my old bits and bytes.
> 
> Anybody have a recommendation for that scenario? I'm agnostic when it
> comes to debian vs rh vs solaris vs bsd. Really don't need anything
> except the ability to read/write via USB 2 or 3 of all my data, boot
> from a minimal local drive (500GB) and support Ethernet and WiFi. I
> don't really care about windowing systems as long as it doesn't get
> in the way too much.
> 
> Any on-the-ground experience of a distro that can be installed
> without systemd is appreciated.

Yes. I've been using Void Linux for about 2 years now, and I'm so in
love with it my wife is jealous. I've used (old) Redhat, Caldera, Corel
Linux, Mandrake, Mandriva, Ubuntu, OpenBSD and Debian: I've found Void
Linux to be more care free and easier to keep operating well than any
of the others.

http://www.voidlinux.eu/

Void has not one bit of systemd in it. No sysvinit either. It inits
with runit, a tiny init system that spins up a PID1 to handle signals
and reap zombies, and that PID1 forks off two rc files, the latter of
which invokes a daemontools-like process supervisor. I like runit 10
times better than sysvinit, which I like ten times better than systemd.

Void is a rolling release, but it's not like Arch or Manjaro where one
false move by the distro guys can bork your computer. Updates are almost
always pristinely clean, and when they're not, you can go to #voidlinux
on Freenode and those guys will help you solve the problem instantly,
because they know if you have it, others will later.

I always swore I'd never get a rolling release. I mean really, it
sounds like a hugely bad idea. But it's worked out for me. And one nice
thing is I'm usually running very current software, so I hear a lot
less of those dweeby "did you update your software" deflections of
specific questions about specific symptom descriptions.

I don't know whether Void offers KDE or Gnome: Both of which I've heard
include code that fails unless systemd is running. Other than those,
Void has all the usual suspects. Some less common software isn't in
Void: For instance, no Mirage image viewer. No biggy, Void offers you
other image viewers. And of course, Void's qemu works flawlessly, so
worst case you can spin up for instance a Lubuntu guest to run software
that doesn't work on Void.

Void has a binary package manager: No compiling like with Gentoo,
Funtoo or *BSD ports. You can consider that a good thing or a bad
thing: I also have a very high opinion of Funtoo.

Speaking of high opinions, I'm very positive about Devuan. I've dabbled
with it, and it worked well. I love the community.

Also check out Alpine Linux. Extremely lightweight, no systemd.

One more piece of advice. Don't out of hand reject a distro just
because it inits with sysvinit. If there's a process you believe
sysvinit is screwing up, what you can do is have sysvinit run the
process supervisor for either runit or s6 (an init that's more capable
but less simple than runit), and have runit or s6 supervise some of
your processes: ESPECIALLY processes you programmed yourself. You just
put respawn process_supervisor_binary into /etc/inittab.

In 2014 you were in big trouble if you didn't want systemd. Today, the
world is the systemd-avoider's oyster.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt 
May 2017 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
http://www.troubleshooters.com/28