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I think that lmilcin was referring to "either use systemd on distribution X or switch to another distribution". E.g. in Gentoo you can choose to use SystemD or

I think that lmilcin was referring to "either use systemd on distribution X or switch to another distribution". E.g. in Gentoo you can choose to use SystemD or OpenRC, but I think that most other distros don't provide such a choice.

kaba0 6y ago
Most don’t provide such a choice, because it’s a huge undertaking to basically package and maintain 2+ versions of everything, especially when one is unified among distros and often created upstream. And of course after a certain size it has to do with network effects, but it was chosen based on merits — for example debian voted multiple times on the issue and I would say their voting system puts most countries’ to shame. I believe up until recently the vote on debian was basically use systemd but if the maintainer wants to, they can also support alternative init systems, but there was not much interest. But of course anyone can help the fringe distros on another init systems to make them less fringe.
- zepearl 6y ago
  > Most don’t provide such a choice, because it’s a huge undertaking to basically package and maintain 2+ versions of everything Yes, I absolutely agree regarding the effort. (not sure about that vote - I honestly didn't follow that discussion) In parallel, some software (cannot recall - maybe the Gnome window mgr) does rely (in its original form) on SystemD being there => I don't think that's fair, kind of forcing the distros that want to offer it to adopt it => I don't like it - I do see the advantage of having that kind of integration, but I still don't like it :P
  - spiralx 6y ago
    Gnome's dependency on logind came about because there originally was a dependency on a different library that one person had written, had pretty much stopped working on, and nobody wanted to take on maintaining it or adding it to Gnome itself. The dependency no longer exists because some people took logind from systemd, made it a standalone package and called it elogind lol, and now you can use that instead of logind.
    - zepearl 6y ago
      Aha! Now I understand why some time ago when I updated my Gentoo distro that elogind-package came up! I had some package conflicts because of that... (but I'm not using Gnome, I have just XFCE4 ). Thanks!

kaba0 6y ago

Most don’t provide such a choice, because it’s a huge undertaking to basically package and maintain 2+ versions of everything, especially when one is unified among distros and often created upstream. And of course after a certain size it has to do with network effects, but it was chosen based on merits — for example debian voted multiple times on the issue and I would say their voting system puts most countries’ to shame. I believe up until recently the vote on debian was basically use systemd but if the maintainer wants to, they can also support alternative init systems, but there was not much interest. But of course anyone can help the fringe distros on another init systems to make them less fringe.

zepearl 6y ago
> Most don’t provide such a choice, because it’s a huge undertaking to basically package and maintain 2+ versions of everything Yes, I absolutely agree regarding the effort. (not sure about that vote - I honestly didn't follow that discussion) In parallel, some software (cannot recall - maybe the Gnome window mgr) does rely (in its original form) on SystemD being there => I don't think that's fair, kind of forcing the distros that want to offer it to adopt it => I don't like it - I do see the advantage of having that kind of integration, but I still don't like it :P
- spiralx 6y ago
  Gnome's dependency on logind came about because there originally was a dependency on a different library that one person had written, had pretty much stopped working on, and nobody wanted to take on maintaining it or adding it to Gnome itself. The dependency no longer exists because some people took logind from systemd, made it a standalone package and called it elogind lol, and now you can use that instead of logind.
  - zepearl 6y ago
    Aha! Now I understand why some time ago when I updated my Gentoo distro that elogind-package came up! I had some package conflicts because of that... (but I'm not using Gnome, I have just XFCE4 ). Thanks!