On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc

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

I use Alpine for servers because I like its simplicity. Not in terms of computational power requirements, just in terms of user experience.

Alpine is an interesting choice for hosting

I’d say servers are one of the main uses of Alpine, second to containers. It would be a much more unusual choice for a desktop OS.

Alpine already uses OpenRC. There’s no option to use systemd with Alpine.

Popular alternatives include runit (which Void uses), OpenRC (Gentoo and Alpine), s6, sysVinit, dinit. The suckless people have also written some suckless inits—I think one of them’s called sinit.

So what are the alternatives that work with both Alpine and Debian?

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.

Judging from this post, I would say you should not be looking to change out your init system as, no disrespect intended, but you really don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know what init systems your operating systems (Alpine and Debian) are using, let alone the details of different init systems.

Some people have strong opinions about init systems. They are nerds with reasons behind those opinions. You don’t seem to have many reasons and you don’t seem to be particularly invested in the debate. I would say it’s not worth your time to change operating system (which is what you would need to do to change your init) just because you heard vaguely that systemd is bad. If you reach a point where init system matters to you, then you won’t need to be asking the questions you’re asking in the OP.

No, I’m not arguing that we should be users of Microsoft. You’re still not understanding what I’m saying. I don’t use Microsoft’s services, including their free ones. Software that happens to be hosted on GitHub is not Microsoft’s software.

You can do whatever you want as an individual. But as a political actor, you should be participating in organised boycotts, such as BDS’s boycott of Microsoft. BDS’s boycott is already fairly wide-sweeping, going as far as to ask people to e.g. stop playing Minecraft and Skyrim, even if they already own the game. Avoiding using Microsoft’s products like this is effective because, even if you’ve already bought the game, you lend Microsoft more cultural capital by proliferating their products.

BDS has not, on the other hand, called for a boycott of all software that happens to have a GitHub repo. If you think they should do that, take it up with BDS. If BDS called for such a boycott, it would get much more momentum behind it.

As it currently stands, you are boycotting all software that has a GitHub repo on your own. This is not going to have any effect. You are going to be hard-pressed to get people to join your boycott. What kernel do you use? The Linux kernel has a GitHub mirror. The majority of FOSS projects where collaboration occurs off of GitHub still have a read-only GitHub mirror. Is your boycott suggesting that everybody should be using OpenBSD? That’s going to be a very hard sell.

BDS has achieved huge victories because it offers targeted boycotts that the average consumer is perfectly capable of doing, and it has a mass movement behind it. There are also grassroots boycotts that have been organised outside of BDS, such as the Starbucks and McDonald’s boycotts, but again, these caught on because they had the backing of people active in the movement and were willing to organise said boycotts. You’re a random Lemmy user who, if you are serious about organising a boycott, you’re in the entirely wrong place to do so. You won’t achieve anything doing what you’re currently doing.

You’re welcome to make whatever consumer decisions you want, but don’t confuse that for political organising.

I’m also opposed to “using [Microsoft’s] free stuff”; I’m arguing that using software that happens to use GH isn’t using MS’s stuff at all.

I don’t see a reason to avoid using software hosted on GH. I moved off GH when MS bought it, and all that entailed was no longer hosting my own software on GH, and using alternative FOSS git forges. That still has a similar effect, and when a critical mass of devs move off GH, the rest will follow suit. The main draw of GH is that everything’s on there; when that’s no longer true, it will no longer be the main git forge. Especially once Forgejo adds ActivityPub integration; I imagine that’ll speed the process along a lot.

A lone user boycotting all software hosted on GH is realistically not going to make any devs move their projects off GH. You may say that it doesn’t have to be a lone user, but I think you’ll be hard pressed to get a whole movement of people refusing to use any software hosted on GH.

I also think the boundaries of your boycott are just too ambiguous. What if you download the software from somewhere other than GH, and it just has a GH repo? Is that ok with you? Is it that you just don’t want to touch MS’s servers? What about software where the GH repo is just a read-only mirror, and the main collaboration/development happens elsewhere, like a GitLab or Forgejo instance? I would rather struggle to see an argument for refusing to use software in either of those cases.

In that case, wireguard. I only occasionally need to access a service that’s not exposed to the internet, so I use ssh -L, but that would be quite inconvenient for your own use case.

I know tailscale exists but I’ve never used it, only tried wireguard on its own. Maybe there’s some huge benefit to using it but wireguard worked fine for me.