On Friday, June 14, 2024, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
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.

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, I like Linux because it is
Unix and it is trivial to install.  Windows?  Hours and hours of finding
drivers after you find some USB network connector that Windows knows?
No thanks.  *BSD - have you installed one of those?  It's a trip back
to the 1980s, those installers are fine for BSD developers but just suck
compared to Linux.  Mainstream Linux just works.

Larry, in that case I think you will be best with sticking to Xubuntu or Debian. These distros just work. And although I am also from anti-systemd camp after years of using systemd in production environments -- pretty much it has been a standard since rhel 7 -- I conclude that systemd is not the end of the world like some purported back in the days. Mostly it just works too.

Switching to some esoteric distro maintained by a couple of university students that will most likely disappear in three years is probably not the best option. Debian is stable and been there from the beginning. All the packages are also there just one simple command away.

These days I am also not that interested in kernel development anymore or debugging low level stuff. It was fun when Linux or FreeBSD kernels were much smaller and less complex.

I am mostly into retro computing and retro games these days; still playing and enjoying old classics like "The Secret of Monkey Island" from LucasArts on period correct hardware.

For daily tasks I am using Macbook which also just works and have a terminal, so I can run my stuff from there. I can control my k8s clusters from the terminal. I am still mostly CLI oriented. Command line will always remain the most elegant and beautiful interface to speak with machines.

--Andy