So,

I’ve never bothered with this before, since systemD seems to work just fine.

But I did this year stop using Ubuntu for most of my hosting needs and moved to Alpine or Debian, depending on what I’m doing.

So it makes sense to optimize even more. I read up a little about why people dislike systemD. Good reasons if mainly you’re worried that it’s doing too much and is too heavy.

So what are the alternatives that work with both Alpine and Debian? What are people using? Is it relatively easy to move from systemD to whatever is your alternative?

Thanks!

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    None. On Alpine you can only use OpenRC and on Debian you can only use systemd. Most distros don’t let you change out the init system. If you want systemdless Debian look into Devuan.

    Fake news. On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc (I have six servers on sysvinit, tho I do actually intend to shift them to systemd later mostly because of the container management goodies).

    Judging from this post, I would say you should not be looking to change out your init system

    Mostly agreeing here. For selfhosting the init system matters barely any, since past the default distro setup one would be doing most of everything with Docker, Podman, etc. At that point, none of the usual Linux religious wars matter much (you can perfectl edit a compose file with nano).

    • communism@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc

      Huh really? Then why does Devuan exist? (I don’t use Debian for context)

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        5 days ago

        Because it was not always the case that sysvinit was supported - things were sorta “accidentally hazy” for a while. There was a time (I think during Debian 9 and 10) that systemd not only was the default, but was also enforcedly linked against a large part of the stack (you couldn’t have a desktop environment, PulseAudio or NetworkManager without systemd, for example).

        This led to the rise of projects like Devuan, that provide a working system that installs without systemd by default; Antix’s nosystemd repo, which allows to install components of the Debian stack without the enforced systemd dependency; and later libam-elogind-compat which aided shimming some of systemd’s requirements under elogind.

        Nowadays at least, the only hard part of not using systemd in Debian is 1.- switching (from or to) seems to require rescue mode and 2.- you lose some of the container management goodies (for eg.: Podman services).