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?
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It's mostly opinionated. systemd is written in C, uses a consistent config, is documented well, has a lot of good developers behind it, is very fast and light, and does what it's doing very well. Since systemd also is split up into multiple parts, it still follows the "do one thing, do it right" philosophy.
There are some people that believe that systemd "took over" the init systems and configuration demons of their distro, and does "too much." It really does quite a lot: it can replace GRUB (by choice), handle networking config, all the init stuff of course, and much more.
However, I have lived through the fragmented and one-off scripts that glued distros together. Some distros used completely custom scripts for init and networking, so you had to learn "the distro" instead of "learn Linux." They were often slower, had worse error handling, had their own bugs, were written in various scripting languages like tcl, Perl, Bash, POSIX shell, etc. It was a mess.
The somewhat common agreed-upon init system was System V, which is ancient. It used runlevels, nested configuration (remember /etc/rc.d?), and generally, it was mostly used because it was battle tested and did the job. However, it is arguably esoteric by modern standards, and the init philosophy was revised to more modern needs with systemd.
You can probably tell my bias, here. If you have to ask, then you probably don't have a "stance" on systemd, and in my opinion, I would stick with systemd. There were dozens of custom scripts running everywhere and constantly changing, and systemd is such an excellent purpose-built replacement. There's a reason why a lot of distros switched to it!
If you want to experience what other init systems were like, I encourage you to experiment with distros like the one you mentioned. You might even play with virtual machines of old Linux versions to see how we did things a while back. Of course, you probably wouldn't want to run an old version of Linux for daily use.
It should also be mentioned that init systems are fairly integral to distros. For example, if you install Apache httpd, you might get a few systemd .service files. Most distros won't include init files for various init systems. You can write them yourself, but that's quite a lot of work, and lots of packages need specific options when starting them as a service. For this reason, if you decide you want to use a different init system, a distro like the one you mentioned would be the best route.
Great question, and good luck! 👍
Great answer. I do use systemd boot on one of my systems as well. It isn't exactly systemd itself is it? Simply a boot loader packaged as part of the general systemd boot suite, right?
Systemd-the-init does depend on some core services and thise need to be used together: Init, logging and IPC. Anything running systemd-init will have journald for logging and IIRC DBus for communication. That's because you need to control a system managing services, so you need to communicate with it and you need to document whatbthe managed services do, so you need logging. And you do want tested and stable code here (reusing something that was widely used in Linux before systemd started) and you do not want that code in the init process either. So systemd-the-init has very simple code tomlog and journald then has thencode needed to stream logs out to disk or to interact with other logging systems.
Everything else is optional and in separate binaries written in a layered architecuture: Each layer uses services provided by the lower layer and offers services to layers higher up in the stack. So lots of services depend on systemd-the-init to start other processes instead of reimplementing that over and over again (thus gaining unified config files for everything that gets started and all the bells and whistles systemd-the-init has already or will pick up later).
Or if you prefer a more negative spin: "Systemd is on huge entangled mess of interdependent binaries" :-)