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

[Vincenzo Nicosia <katolaz@freaknet.org>]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 05:59:02PM -0700, Larry McVoy 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.

TL;DR:
Devuan (https://devuan.org) works more or less fine as a daily drive,
both as a desktop and on servers, and it gives choice of sysvinit,
runit, openrc, and lately also s6 I believe (but I haven't tried it). If
you need something that "kinda works" without systemd, well, Devuan is
still "kinda usable", and possibly one of the best options around. 



Personal rant follows. You are not expected to read this ;P

Linux is probably broken beyond repair now, and I am saying that with a
heavy heart, having used exlusively Linux and all the other *BSD in the
last 26 years, and having advocated its adoption strongly, in different
environments. In many ways, Linux is not unix, not any more, to any
sensible measure, and since a good while ago. 

These days Linux can only provide a somehow-lightly-unixy-flavoured
system that "kinda works", provided that you do things as the distro
decided, and do not look under the hood, ever. I personally believe
Linux was at its top around 10-12 years ago, even in terms of how well
everything worked in it and how easy it still was to do things your own
way, if you wanted to do so. It was still simple enough, yet it provided
a full-featured computing experience, from desktops to high-end servers.

Nowadays if you decide to use Linux you must accept that far too many
things "do happen" to your computer, and neither you nor anybody else
knows why they do, or why they shouldn't, or how to alter their
behavious or avoid them altogether. There is so much complexity
everywhere that there is almost no space left for KISS, anywhere. Linux
has eaten itself alive plus a whole bunch of additional bloat, many
times, recursively.


I have already moved all the servers away of Linux in the last 6-7
years, and I am currently in the last phase of moving my desktops away
from it as well. It's a sad farewell, but a necessary one. You can't be
totally fed up and keep carrying on for long, can you? :)

My2Cents

Enzo

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