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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What worries me about the "systemd does everything as a tightly integrated package" is the too-big-to-fail aspect. I'd be worried that we're seeing a lot of configurations that can't be pulled apart piecemeal-- for example, if you need a feature not available in systemd, or you need to deactivate a systemd component due to an unfixed vulnerability. It feels like there's value in supporting a non-systemd init in the same way there's value for individual packages to support an architecture beyond x86-64-- you get some extra checks that you aren't making assumptions that only work for a specific happy path.
The problem of not having systemd is the mess what've seen before. It doesn't make sense to have 200 different services to be able to have usable dual-stack networking. Furthermore Init and Cron are aging, having everything based on bash scripts doesn't cut it anymore - they don't scale, you can't monitor and audit things properly and worse it creates a dependency on some very specific shell.
It's been the default for ~10 years and it hasn't been an issue yet.. Even if it did "fail" the solution would never be to roll an entirely different init system. That would be absurd. If there is a bug, it gets patched.
You can run services independently of systemd. There is no reason you couldn't have whatever feature you want and systemd at the same time.
When vulnerabilities are discovered there is disclosure to maintainers, a patch is released, and then an announcement is made publicly with the instructions on how to fix the problem. I've never seen an instance where the industry collectively says "There's a vulnerability here but we aren't going to fix it. Good luck!" Especially for such an important layer of the stack.. There's no way that is going to happen.