[TUHS] Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' ??? The Register

[Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>]

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> writes:

> This is all well and good but what I, and I suspect other 
> boomers like me,
> are looking for, is something like Ubuntu without systemd.  I'm 
> a xubuntu
> guy (Ubuntu with a lighter weight desktop), but whatever. 
> Ubuntu is fine,
> everything works there.
>
> So is there an "Everything just works" distro without systemd? 
> A guy can
> hope but I suspect not.

Mm, well, i guess that depends on what one's "everything" is. i 
used Ubuntu years ago - having moved from Mandriva - and was 
pleased by how everything "just worked". But over time i started 
experiencing various issues where things _didn't_ just work (i 
can't remember what now; i think printing might have been one 
thing), which became increasingly frustrating. So i moved to 
Debian, and had a much more "just works" experience. But then 
Debian moved to systemd, and i started getting frustrated again in 
various ways, and so i moved to Void.

Void's a binary distro, and i don't recall having any more issues 
with it than i ended up having with Ubuntu. And for experienced 
*n*x users, the installation process is trivial (even if the 
installer is text-based, rather than involving snazzy graphics).

> I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass but I'm 62, I prefer to 
> spend my
> effort on fishing on the ocean, I'm not some young guy that 
> wants to
> put in a ton of hours on my Linux install

Fwiw, i'm a 50-year-old woman. :-) My first distro was RedHat 5.2, 
around the end of '97.

To me, this is a "bubbles in wallpaper" thing. i've spent the time 
setting up Gentoo because i'm now at the point where i'm clear on 
what i do and don't need/want (in general), and i'm trying to 
minimise the extent to which i'm beholden to having to deal with 
breaking changes to subsystems / libraries / software that i don't 
need/want, or with breakages i don't know how to immediately fix 
or workaround. Because i have _many_ other life commitments 
myself, and i've never distro-hopped just for the fun of it; i've 
always been driven to do so, for various reasons. My distro is 
merely a means to an end, not the end in itself.

(i've taken on s6 documentation stuff because although there's no 
shortage of people wanting alternatives to systemd, there are far 
fewer people volunteering to do even small amounts of the work 
necessary for that.)


Alexis.