[machuidel]

I've had many issues with NetworkManager, Avahi and Pulseaudio. I already decided to avoid them a long time ago. My distribution of choice, after using Slackware for several years, has always been Debian. There have been moments I tried to switch to FreeBSD and Gentoo. Since Debian decided to use Systemd I started to use Gentoo again, with the hardened profile, and avoid most of the software I do not agree with. I even created Ebuild packages for the latest MATE desktop and removed all dependencies to anything that has anything to do with GNOME 3 except GTK 3, which is optional as GTK 2 can be used as well.

Somewhere along the line a kind of "takeover" happened. I am not going to say that the people doing this are "evil" or something as they at least contributed something that can be used for free. Difficult to argue with that. But I cannot stop myself having the feeling that there is some hidden agenda of interests behind it as well. For me this "takeover" looks similar to what happened to W3C where certain people (companies?) started to ignore them and created HTML5 instead. I really like the well-formness of XHTML where XML itself is very strict and has many built-in features which are still missing inside what replaced them in popularity, like JSON. The people of W3C knew what they were doing and strived for every change to be stable and future proof which can be a slow process. Too slow for some people it seems.

Of course I tried to use Systemd and was really happy with it till the moment it started crashing and taking some clusters down with it. I migrated 2 servers to the new Debian and everything went well. Even the LXC containers started just fine until I started to upgrade the containers to the new Debian as well. At that time I did not even know the author of Systemd was the same as the one that started Pulseaudio, but somehow these issues gave me the same feeling of uncertainty that reminded me of it.

For the servers I am now using Gentoo (as almost every other distro already switched to systemd) in combination with OpenRC without any issues. Compilation of source packages happens on a separate server where I can test them before deploying the binary packages I just build to the test and production servers.