Ive been runing Debian 12 (kde) since bookworm was released and am loving it.
I have recently discovered Devuan which seems to be Debian without systemd - what is the benefit of removing this init system?
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Short version: some people (I'm one of them) object to systemd on grounds that are 75% philosophical and 25% the kind of tech detail that's more of a matter of taste than anything else. The older sysV init is a smaller program, which means that it has a smaller absolute number of bugs than systemd but also does less on its own. Some of us regard "does less" as a feature rather than a bug.
If systemd works for you and you don't know or care about the philosophical side of the argument, there is probably no benefit for you in switching.
Exactly this. There are few techincal problems with systemd, but those are so miniscule. I say this as an OpenRC+openrc-init user.
I'm more bothered by the very concept of an integrated supervision suite (running as PID 1 and managing services in runtime). And with the feature creep (not-invented-here syndrome despite being mostly worse on all metrics), the following heavy binding of applications to it's services and that it can't coexist, because of that, with any other init/service manager in a repo without an uncount number of wrapper scripts (some distros tried).
taking a breath Which is why we must have specialized not-systemd distros instead of Choose-your-iso-with-bootloader-X-and-Desktop-Y distros, like Artix does (a not-systemd distro).
The attitude of the devs to technical issues and even security holes is another issue. Systemd is really bad software in that regard.
I basically lump everything you've listed under "philosophy"—poorly chosen design goals and no one at the project doing anything about dev behaviour are not technical flaws per se, as the software is functioning as intended and expected.
systemd and init+OpenRC can exist together in the same repository, though—it just means that the repository also needs to contain both init scripts and service files, both of which are trivially small.
As a Gentoo user since 2005, I've been able to watch the entire debacle as it's progressed, and the various efforts required to keep udev and friends working separately from systemd. (Currently, there are 7 Gentoo packages on the "absolutely requires systemd" list—6 optional daemons that I don't perceive as being very useful, although maybe it's just me, and one library that I've never heard of in any other context. So what's being done to keep it from taking over is working.)
Ok, except OpenRC.
And the init system systemd replaced was also serial.
Which means that you trade some speed for making it easier to understand what's going on at any point during init. (Also, OpenRC does have a parallel mode, although it isn't commonly used.) "Serial" isn't inherantly evil, it's just another tradeoff.