eth0up 5 days ago

After over a decade of Debian, when I upgraded my PC, I tried every big systemd-based distro, including opensuse, which I wholly loathed. I finally decided on Void and feel at home as I did 20+ years ago when I began.

There are serious problems with the systemd paradigm, most of which I couldn't argue for or against. But at least in Void, I can remove network-manger altogether, use cron as I always have, and generally remain free to do as I please until eventually every package there is has systemd dependencies which seems frightfully plausible at this pace.

Void is as good as I could have wanted. If that ever goes, I guess it's either BSD or a cave somewhere.

I'm glad to see the terse questions here. They're well warranted.

  • jamespo 5 days ago

    How is systemd stopping you use cron?

    • eth0up 5 days ago

      Not stopping. Just clashing with that and a hundred other things that I never wanted managed by one guy. Systemd.timer, systemd.service, yes, trivial, but I don't catalog every thing that bothers me about systemd - I just stay away from it. There are plenty of better examples. So where ever I wrote 'stop', it should read hinder.

    • direwolf20 5 days ago

      systemd parses your crontab and runs the jobs inside on its own terms

      of course you can run Cron as well and run all your jobs twice in two different ways, but that's only pedantically possible as it's a completely useless way to do things.

      • NekkoDroid 5 days ago

        > systemd parses your crontab and runs the jobs inside on its own terms

        systemd itself only has 2 references to "crontab" in its entire codebase and both of those are in man-pages.

        My educated guess is that some other package is installing a generator to generate systemd units out of the crontab (e.g. https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron)

  • TacticalCoder 5 days ago

    > Void is as good as I could have wanted. If that ever goes, I guess it's either BSD or a cave somewhere.

    If systemd-less Linux ever go, there are indeed still the BSDs. But I thought long and hard about this and already did some testing: I used to run Xen back in the early hardware-virt days and nowadays I run Proxmox (still, sadly, systemd-based).

    An hypervisor with a VM and GPU passthrough to the VM is at least something too: it's going to be a long long while before people who want to take our ability to control our machines will be able to prevent us from running a minimal hypervisor and then the "real" OS in a VM controlled by the hypervisor.

    I did GPU passthrough tests and everything works just fine: be it Linux guests (which I use) or Windows guests (which I don't use).

    My "path" to dodge the cave you're talking about is going to involved an hypervisor (atm I'm looking at the FreeBSD's bhyve hypervisor) and then a VM running systemd-less Linux.

    And seen that, today, we can run just about every old system under the sun in a VM, I take we'll all be long dead before evil people manage to prevent us from running the Linux we want, the way we want.

    You're not alone. And we're not alone.

    I simply cannot stand the insufferable arrogance of Agent Poettering. Especially not seen the kitchen sink that systemd is (systemd ain't exactly a homerun and many are realizing that fact now).

filmor 5 days ago

Gentoo doesn't "exist" because it is necessary to have an alternative to systemd. Gentoo is simply about choice and works with both openrc and systemd. It supported other inits to some degree as well im the past.

forty 5 days ago

Systemd has recently added experimental support for musl libc, which should eventually allow Alpine to upgrade though

  • direwolf20 5 days ago

    If they want to. Alpine is minimal. systemd is anything but. It's like the GNOME of inits.