systemd cat and GNU cat hugging a Linux cat.
Why should I not use systemd?
When you want to feel special but not enough to go to the effort of using FreeBSD
I already am special enough, my mom said so
because the over 70 different binaries of systemd are "not modular" because they are designed to work together. What makes a monolith is, apparently, the name of the overarching project, not it being a single binary (which again, it's not)
If I cared about modularity I'd use something like Hurd, but i actually need to get shit done
What makes it a monolith is that the 70 binaries refuse to do their one job (see: Unix philosophy) independently.
A few months ago, a systemd update broke my boot process because I dared set up my device-mapper nodes manually in a minimal initrd without having a second copy of systemd in there as well. The device is there, yet systemd times out "waiting for device". How come then a manual mount -a in the rescue shell works then?
If course, the bug had already been reported and swiftly rejected by L. "Hurr durr bother your distributor not me" Pottering.
If you have to ask, then there's no reason not to. It's people who tinker with their systems that encounter issues with it, or more often random annoyances that add up over tme to those memes.
Void, because it works really well on my super low-resource chromebook!
any advice for trying void? Ive heard good things but never really gave it a chance.
"systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time" -Churchill, if he had been a nerd
As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd? I use Mint and I don't remember having to interact with that kind of low-level nonsense. The distro maintainers can use whatever reasoning they want to pick these details.
Tribalism exists in every circle, perhaps moreso in tech circles. Ironically anyone who hates on a distro could just switch, or build their own distro if they were so inclined, but it's often the hating that people participate more in than using their system. Use what works for you, and if it no longer works for you use something else.
As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd?
Um, because as a user you may have to deal with services, or other systemd features?
Let's say you want to start ssh-agent when you login to your desktop environment. Well, there's a systemd service for that that you can enable, and on another distro you'd have to do it another way (autostart script or something).
Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn't need Linux for work reasons.
This feels like an "I would switch to Linux if I didn't need Windows for work" comment from another universe.
Fair point. :-)
At the end of the day, the OS has to run the software/applications one needs to get shit done... if it is macOS or Windows, that's okay.
In my defense, I ran NetBSD for several years a long time back, and it was one of the best OS experiences I ever had. I am just old/pragmatic/flexible enough, to choose setups with less friction, if possible. ;-)
Still, I think it is a shame that Linux mostly took over the UNIX world and the BDS are left for hardcore nerds/embedding/game consoles and Solaris and co are not viable options anymore. Portable software and its stability benefited a lot from bugs detected on other platforms (OpenBSD was always a forerunner here).
I have to say as someone who uses NixOS I love systemd, because it makes a lot of things very easy. For example hardening services ( systemd-analyze security) or replacing cron (system timer).
systemd is fine. The only people I've ever heard complain about it are lonely neckbeards pretending like their opinion somehow matters.
I've used Debian as a server system since it was using init.d. And do you know what I found? systemd is easier. And the fact that Debian of all distros decided to use it says a lot.
It says that you barely can have Systemd and alternatives in the same repo without shims and patches.
That wasn't the question though.
ReactOS.
I have no moral or philosophical objections to the design of Windows NT, just the company that makes it and the enshittification. If ReactOS ever becomes stable enough to be daily used I would use it. For now I use LinuxMint and Steam OS at home.
I have a moral objection: backslash () usage in file paths.
System service managers like systemd, OpenRC, runit, or SysVinit often come down to user preference. While these systems are crucial for initializing and managing services on servers, where uptime, resource allocation, and specific daemon behaviors are important, their impact on a typical desktop or laptop is generally minimal.
For most personal devices, the primary functions of a service manager occur largely out of sight. As long as the system boots reliably and applications run smoothly, the underlying service manager rarely registers as a significant factor in the daily user experience.
For many, including myself, systemd simply works without much fuss. My choice to stick with it isn't due to strong conviction or deep technical analysis, but rather the simple fact that I've rarely, if ever, had to interact with it directly. For my personal desktop and laptop, it reliably handles booting, service management, and shutdown in the background. If it's not broken and isn't hindering my daily computing, there's no compelling reason to explore alternatives.
So the old init.d system was better? Come on people, let's stop infighting. I have zero preference on init systems. You know why? Because they're just plumbing. Stop this nonsense. Do I click on an init system? Do I use the init system to check my email? Or play games? No. I know poettering can be controversial, but let's just move on. Run freebsd if you're so butt hurt.
So much more than an init system though, which I think is why people don't like it. Personally, the only annoyance I have is I preferred log files over journald.
Alpine.
Have used crux but using low end / old hardware results in almost permanent building software.
GNU cat
You mean GNU cat?
What's wrong with systemd?
All I hear about it is that it doesn't follow the Unix philosophy of a program should do one thing and do it well. And while it does seem quite large and do a lot of things, out of all the times I have broken my system, systemd has never been to blame.
Edit: deleted duplicate comment.
Wait until people find out about the Linux kernel. It does so many things!
Void Linux, although I use NixOS nowadays.
I suppose that would be Android, since that's the only non systemd OS I use.
Artix with openrc
what is that little pixel cat at the top? It also appears on https://katia.ripe.net/ is it referencing something?
Oh, I just use this app called ANeko. Here's the f-droid link.
It makes a cat run on my screen all day. It was there when I took this screenshot.
Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they're both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).
If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that's small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.
I don't daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my "favorite".
Hint: :q!
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