I’m curious to know why people use systemd-less distributions. Which one would you recommend to someone who wants to stop using systemd?

  • eta@feddit.orgEnglish
    10·
    8 days ago

    Recently I started experimenting with Alpine Linux. Initially because I wanted something for a Raspberry Pi which had newer packages than Raspberry OS and was quite minimal. Now I also installed it on a spare laptop and set up a desktop environment with the River Compositor mostly just to try it out. Most things I want to do are already working as expected while after boot it uses only 380MB of RAM. So I like how minimal it is, the package management is really nice and stable and it just runs very nicely on this older laptop.

    • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
      2·
      7 days ago

      Alpine is a wonderful distribution if you can afford to opt out of all thr security improvements made in the last 20 years.

      Just try to log the keystrokes of another user (as root/some other user or even from a program running as the same user) and compare that to a modern systemd system. It is amazing what a difference the new kernel features make (revoking access, only allowing one process access) together with systemd-logind to pass access around to the right processes. There are tons more examples… any progress made right now is in systemd first. In fact most progress is never taken up outside systemd at all.

      • eta@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I’m not really that deep into it but I’m also using elogind and Alpine uses the newest Kernel so do your points still apply in that case?

        • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
          1·
          18 hours ago

          The kernal of course has exactly the same functionality as kernels in systemd distributions. What good is that without the user space using the functionality though? A portable init tool will not use any of that… as soon as they do, the portability is gone and they are linux-only.

          Systemd-logind delegates priviledged operations like cgroup creation, power management, and such to PID1 (systemd) because that is the process with the necessary privileges and global view of the entire system to perform them. Managing that stuff is the one job systemd-PID1 has, logind is in a layer above and uses the foundational interfaces from the layer beneath it.

          Elogind removes that integration by necessity. No idea what it does instead, but going by elogind devs stating that consolekit was good enough and that logind is just a power grab, I doubt they do a very thorough job. That elogind is basically only updated when a new gnome version uses interfaces not provided by elogind does not indicate a very pro-active maintainer team to me.

          But you do what you think is best for your systems, I do what I think is best for mine.

            • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
              1·
              13 hours ago

              Go ahead, you have my blessing. Not that you need it or care about it :-)

              Just out of interest: Where do you think the future of computing is?

              • Khleedril@cyberplace.social
                1·
                12 hours ago

                @hunger I don’t think the future is either #guix or #shepherd, but I do think it lies in that direction. I think there will be some merging between cron/init/make as these are all things which perform some action when some conditions happen.

                But I’ll probably end up being completely wrong…