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?
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?
Back when systemd was a hot topic I jumped on the bandwagon of using systemd-less distros just because people were telling me how bad it was. To this day I still use openrc but the reality is that systemd works very well and is easy to understand and use. The average user gains no benefit to using another init besides having a better understanding of how the system works.
Well and a faster boot time but it’s definitely a learning curve and not really worth it unless you want to try a Distro that ships something else by default (E.g. Alpine).
Faster by how much. My PC boots almost instantly now.
I never had a fast NVME SSD so my devices boot significantly slower than yours but unless you are actually at the point of instant booting it’s about half the boot time for me. I only use OpenRC on my Pinephone because it’s the default for PostmarketOS (a Alpine based OS for mobile phones) and never found a good enough reason to use it on my actual computer but it’s quite a bit faster and also quite a bit less convinient so all in all probably not worth it but still impressive to watch!
I am on an NVMe drive, however most of my boot time actually comes from the POST process so even if I were to switch to an OpenRC (or runit / another init system), it wouldn’t really have any meaningful impact on my system’s boot time unfortunately.
❯ systemd-analyze time Startup finished in 17.412s (firmware) + 2.684s (loader) + 3.587s (kernel) + 2.134s (initrd) + 9.244s (userspace) = 35.063s graphical.target reached after 9.208s in userspace.This is such a “consumer-grade” take imo. No offense intended, but in enterprise Linux development systemd is considered horrible trash.
I can see why a more casual / desktop user would love it, though.
Hi. Long time enterprise Linux admin here. Systemd is great and way, way better than sysvinit. I’ve also used openrc and i can say it is okay.
Yeah I’m not sure where the idea that systemd is “trash” in the enterprise world is coming from. Of all the contacts that I know who work in an enterprise environment say this, nor have I even seen anyone on the internet mention this.
I mean if there’s an actual reason for it other than just the usual bandwagon of “systemd bad” I’m all ears.
Wait, people really believe writing boilerplate filled bash scripts to implement just the idea of dependencies does scale into enterprise environments? Which don’t come even close to emulate most of the very useful and important features systemd provides?
Seriously that’s a take I have never heard one say while keeping a serious face. There is a reason systemd is as popular as it is for every desktop and server distro out there.
It is far from perfect, but who in their right mind would want sys-v init or similar systems back? I can’t even imagine what a mess it would be managing all the contexts and implementing it securely and portable with an init script.
Yeah, that’s the point. Again, the average user (as in desktop user) gains nothing from using a different init. There may have been some crazy server-side scenario where the type of init you used actually mattered but we’re talking about desktop Linux, which the answer is a clear-cut no. I’m not stopping the people that are interested in trying a different init out, I’m just telling them that there’s little to no benefit in the end if they’re expecting an improvement in performance or whatever else.
As someone who wants to learn enterprise linux rather than desktop linux, I would like more detail, but I’m willing to just take your word for it.