Free GNU+Linux base OS. Devuan is a fork of Debian without systemd. Devuan provides a safe upgrade path from Debian, to ensure the right to Init Freedom and avoid entanglement.
It’s mainly developed and funded by red hat a company owned by ibm which has made a lot of bad decisions over the years (of the top of my head I remember their distro’s source code was made available to customers only)
it’s one piece of software that does a ton of different things, this is generally considered a bad thing as it increases the attack surface for potential vulnerabilities but as far as I understand, since it’s one of the most maintained software in the Linux ecosystem the probability of it having critical vulnerabilities is probably still pretty low
That being said, if it works fine for you and those problems don’t bother you there’s not much reason to use something else.
Yeah, CachyOS has been working just fine for me. And while both of those points raise an eyebrow for me, I have also heard things about the Cachy team that do the same. Perfect can’t be the enemy of good enough. Though to that second point you raised, I just watched a [Veritasium?] video recently on how just such a system-level package was very nearly compromised by what has all the hallmarks of a malicious state actor precisely because it was so seemingly innocuous and open.
I appreciate the clear and concise explanation. Cheers, friend.
Basically systemd is not just a replacement for init, it’s a huge project which reimplements a lot of “legacy” services that were handled by other packages. So people think it steps over its boundaries. Not being very Unix-y.
That said, anything is better than bloody sysvinit. Kids these days don’t know how much jank and spaghetti we had to deal with back in those crappy days
I use it and it does the job, but the problem is that it doesn’t adhere to Unix philosophy of pluggable components that do one thing. In fact, the systemd suite does dozens of things:
People keep mentioning this. It’s not actually a problem
It’s not even a good philosophy anymore (although, not actually even sure where this statement originated). The Linux kernel does more than 1 thing. So does Gnome, KDE, etc.
The old init scripts did “one thing”, but, because they did too little, the scripts were difficult to write, there were issues like race conditions, etc.
Anyone who ever wrote a SysV script would tell you what an absolute nightmare they were… Whereas, SystemD, even more complex ones which depend on a lot of factors are now easy (and only a few lines).
systemd init scripts are more ergonomic than sysvinit scripts. I agree.
Does systemd work? Yes. Can I live with it? Yes. I’ve embraced it since it became a de facto standard.
The thing I somewhat dislike is that you cannot easily replace individual systemd components. The systemd-logind and systemd-journald for example have to be compiled from the exact same systemd version (e.g. both v234). There are way more gotchas like that if you try to replace them for non-systemd alternatives.
If you’re solely interested in having a working OS then it’s all good. If you like to tinker and learn, and want to fully embrace Unix modularity mindset then systemd made your life a little more difficult in that aspect.
Also I’m glad that distributions like Void Linux, Guix or Devuan from this post title exist that try another approach. I hope one day I’ll have enough time to daily drive them!
There is no issue with systemd. It has been a huge improvement over what was there and it is still improving.
It makes the system consistent without having to configure it using arcane shell scripts. It gives you easy to read config files. It just makes the administrator’s life easier.
What’s the issue with systemd?
I was shy about Linux for far too long, but have jumped in with both feet recently.
If you need to ask, it most certainly doesn’t matter to you. Keep using what you are using.
The main concerns are:
That being said, if it works fine for you and those problems don’t bother you there’s not much reason to use something else.
Yeah, CachyOS has been working just fine for me. And while both of those points raise an eyebrow for me, I have also heard things about the Cachy team that do the same. Perfect can’t be the enemy of good enough. Though to that second point you raised, I just watched a [Veritasium?] video recently on how just such a system-level package was very nearly compromised by what has all the hallmarks of a malicious state actor precisely because it was so seemingly innocuous and open.
I appreciate the clear and concise explanation. Cheers, friend.
Basically systemd is not just a replacement for init, it’s a huge project which reimplements a lot of “legacy” services that were handled by other packages. So people think it steps over its boundaries. Not being very Unix-y.
That said, anything is better than bloody sysvinit. Kids these days don’t know how much jank and spaghetti we had to deal with back in those crappy days
I use it and it does the job, but the problem is that it doesn’t adhere to Unix philosophy of pluggable components that do one thing. In fact, the systemd suite does dozens of things:
People keep mentioning this. It’s not actually a problem
It’s not even a good philosophy anymore (although, not actually even sure where this statement originated). The Linux kernel does more than 1 thing. So does Gnome, KDE, etc.
The old init scripts did “one thing”, but, because they did too little, the scripts were difficult to write, there were issues like race conditions, etc.
Anyone who ever wrote a SysV script would tell you what an absolute nightmare they were… Whereas, SystemD, even more complex ones which depend on a lot of factors are now easy (and only a few lines).
systemd init scripts are more ergonomic than sysvinit scripts. I agree.
Does systemd work? Yes. Can I live with it? Yes. I’ve embraced it since it became a de facto standard.
The thing I somewhat dislike is that you cannot easily replace individual systemd components. The systemd-logind and systemd-journald for example have to be compiled from the exact same systemd version (e.g. both v234). There are way more gotchas like that if you try to replace them for non-systemd alternatives.
If you’re solely interested in having a working OS then it’s all good. If you like to tinker and learn, and want to fully embrace Unix modularity mindset then systemd made your life a little more difficult in that aspect.
Also I’m glad that distributions like Void Linux, Guix or Devuan from this post title exist that try another approach. I hope one day I’ll have enough time to daily drive them!
Your browser doesn’t follow the unix philosophy: Downloading a site is 1 job, rendering another one. Do change that to?
deleted by creator
There is no issue with systemd. It has been a huge improvement over what was there and it is still improving.
It makes the system consistent without having to configure it using arcane shell scripts. It gives you easy to read config files. It just makes the administrator’s life easier.
I think the main problem here is that now there’s a high reliance on systemd tools in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, limiting users freedom.
There is none these days
Some people overreacted.
In practice, it’s basically been a huge benefit for Linux and fixed a lot of issues
Don’t put all your fruit in one basket applies.