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by rezonant 2226 days ago
Before I comment here: I am a fan of systemd in many ways, and I happily use it on my systems. That being said, you do really have to think about the systemic factors at play here. As noted in the original article, Debian found itself in a position where the amount of work to sustain a non-systemd path in a systemd-dominated ecosystem would be too much work _for them_. If you personally have more development time then the entirety of the Debian project, then by all means. Let's just not assume that this is a feasible thing for a single person to handle, and really for all intents and purposes, trying to maintain a Linux distribution (or even just a personal Linux system) without using systemd at this point is folly, no matter how much you dislike it.

That being said, SysV init is (in fact) terrible. I'd say put the effort into something that can supercede systemd some day. That part of the problem is tractable, though success is quite a long-shot given its entrenchment.

3 comments

The person who wrote the headlined article also wrote commentary back in 2014 on discussions of systemd, which highlighted the false dichotomy that people propound that the decision is between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd. You are doing that very thing, years later.

That was never the case, especially so for Debian that you mention. In the Debian Hoo-Hah, the choices were van Smoorenburg init+rc, OpenRC, Upstart and systemd; the latter three being the main contenders, as was acknowledged partway through the affair. In Fedora and Ubuntu, the choice was between Upstart and systemd, Upstart having been what they used for some years before systemd.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20141222234706/http://uselessd.d...

I do want to say that despite my comment here, seems like projects like Devuan, Void, and Arch are doing OK with this, in concert with projects like elogind and eudev etc that forego systemd while providing compatible replacements.
> Debian found itself in a position where the amount of work to sustain a non-systemd path in a systemd-dominated ecosystem would be too much work _for them_

Just as a side note for the interested, there is a project named Devuan that launched to keep alive a Debian sans systemd.

https://devuan.org/

(I've never run it myself; I just happen to know it exists.)