14 ms·

Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

87 points by smartmic 9mo ago

t43562 9mo ago
I haven't used Devuan for a while but I use another systemd-free distro and I think all such distros have benefited from work that Devuan has done to keep the option on the table. I think you can even get my favorite init system on Devuan now - dinit. It has a simple and useful service file format that's trivial to use and it can monitor and restart processes and users can use it for starting up their daemons etc - BUT it doesn't take over the world and the log file formats are all text.
saidnooneever 9mo ago
never used this one but glad to see systemd free stuff. definitely interested to try thanks for sharin!
_flux 9mo ago
It seems though not having systemd in it would be against "init freedom": https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom . Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?
- imp0cat 9mo ago
  Yep, no "unnecessary entanglements" evidently (their words, not mine).
  - LooseMarmoset 9mo ago
    > Unnecessary entanglements The problems with systemd are: * that once it was adopted, every single package started requiring it * which meant that packages that previously could run everywhere, now could only run on systemd-based systems * binary logs - a solution that solved nothing but created problems * which locked out any system that wasn't linux * which locked out any linux system that didn't want to use it * which led to abominations like systemd-resolved * "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else *can* be used. literally everything the systemD crowd has done leads to lockout and loss of choice. All ramrodded through by IBM/RedHat. The systemD developers don't care about any of this, of course. They've got a long history of breaking user space and poor dev practices because they're systemD. I mean, their attitude was so bad they got one of their principal devs kicked from the kernel because they overloaded the use of the kernel boot parameter "debug", which flooded the console, and refused to modify the debug option to something compatible like "systemd.debug", broke literally every other system, and then told everybody else "hey we're not wrong, the rest of the world is wrong." And this has been their attitude since then. Look, if people want to use systemD, that's just fine. But it is a fact that the entire development process for systemD is predicated on making Linux incompatible with anything else, which is an entire inversion of how Linux and Free Software works. I actually like unit files. But if systemD was just an init system, it would stop there.
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      > * "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else can be used. You're saying that because the person who made systemd now work on hardware attestation, all Linux distributions will eventually require remote hardware attestation, where users don't actually have the keys? Maybe I'm naive, maybe I trust my distribution too much (Arch btw), but I don't see that happening. Probably Ubuntu and some other more commercial OSes might, but we'll still have choices in what OS/distribution to use, so just "vote with your partitions" or whatever.
      - LooseMarmoset 9mo ago
        If you build remote attestation into your product, corporate entities will require it. Just look at Android - What phones today give you unlimited root? If you have rooted, what applications have you broken? If you root, what e-fuses have you blown in your CPU meaning it can never be un-rooted? Android, at the start, was open and freely modified - not so much anymore. Companies like Google can and have cut off access to user's data, without recourse. You can't modify your phone, so you don't own your phone. You just pay rent until they don't support it anymore.
        embedding-shape 9mo ago
        I think phones are a completely different beast though (and already a lost cause), PCs seems a lot more resilient to that sort of lock down. But on the other hand, you might be right, you never know how the future looks. But personally I'll wait until there is at least some signal that it's moving in that direction, before I start prepping for it to actually happening.
        LooseMarmoset 9mo ago
        Everything else has moved in that direction: * Literally every game console * Literally every smartphone * Microsoft, with their Win11 requirements, is moving there * John Deere (read on their own hardware attestation efforts to block DIY) * Car companies (require specialized tooling and software subscriptions to make certain repairs) * Anything that requires a signed bootloader and signed software updates * Snapdragon CPUs and e-fuses that burn when you use unsigned software, and brick * Apple hardware, literally crypto-signed so you can't use aftermarket parts * Google Chromecast * Amazon Kindle, locked hardware * IBM has locked hardware to their laptops for *years*. Ever try upgrading a wifi card in an IBM laptop? They're already invested in this the list goes on...of course it's coming to PC.
- mdlxxv 9mo ago
  Their criterion for an init system to qualify for this so-called "init freedom" seems to be "not being systemd".
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  they could've just cut out other systemd components (ntp, dns management etc) and use systemd The point of devuan is "we really do not like systemd". That's entire feature list
  - t43562 9mo ago
    Why provide systemd if devuan is just debian with systemd alternatives? What would be the point - if you want systemd use debian?
- Calzifer 9mo ago
  > Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do? Reading the first sentence on that page was to much? "Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice." systemd fails on the portability criteria. Apart from that, why should they invest there limited time to include systemd? Devuan is Debian without systemd. If you want systemd install Debian.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  A systemd distro tends to be locked to systemd, with many pieces of software requiring systemd to be running. An init–freedom distro avoids such dependencies. Presumably, you can still install systemd if you really want to.
baggy_trough 9mo ago
Always good to have options, but I'd personally never want to use a Linux without systemd.
phendrenad2 9mo ago
I like Devuan because it matches the Linux I learned - people who learned with a Systemd distro might not like it as much.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  I can use systemd but it's always annoying to configure and sometimes randomly breaks and it's hard to know why. init.d scripts are no better, though. Runit is quite cool.
  - j16sdiz 9mo ago
    runit is optional on Devuan.
- MadnessASAP 9mo ago
  I personally am very much happy that Linux is not like the Linux I learned. Slackware was an excellent learning experience and will always hold a dear place in my heart and memories, but not on any of my computers.
  - fernandotakai 9mo ago
    same. i still remember how painful it was to setup services without systemd. having to manually deal with daemons was so painful, to the point of being exoteric.
    - Tistron 9mo ago
      Exoteric is the opposite of esoteric, which is the word you mean :)
    - claudex 9mo ago
      The worst was editing an existing service for the distribution. With systemd you just need an override file, without, you have to patch the file and review it each time it is upgraded to check the differences.
remix2000 9mo ago
"Tricycle – Car Without Engine" Honestly though, the argument against systemd is that it moves too much stuff into init, but I don't think it does enough of that, it's still extremely conservative, like, SD-DBus should be using binder x-port IMO.
- XorNot 9mo ago
  The thing is systemd really doesn't: the things people claim "shouldn't be in an init system" aren't - but there are systemd branded versions of a lot of basic facilities because you generally need something like them in a usable system. And a lot of those utilities are just straight better then the alternatives, or at least make a decent practicality vs correctness trade off for desktop Linux. systemd-cryptenroll for example is just straight up much easier to use for most applications of FDE, unless you're really doing network unlocking with something like Clevis.
- account42 9mo ago
  No, one complaint (out of many) against SystemD is that it moves too much complexity into PID 0 which is a very special process on Linux that must not crash ever or the whole system goes down with it. The init system is one thing that SystemD insists on running under PID 0 even though it could be designed otherwise.
  - remix2000 9mo ago
    But PID 0 on Linux is the idle task…? Init is (usually) PID 1, PID 0 kinda just means that nothing is running on a given CPU (with caveats), also killing 0 has special meaning because well it's not a real process…
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      Nitpicking. Of course they meant PID 1.
- teddyh 9mo ago
  Systemd seemd to be moving away from D-Bus and adopting varlink instead.
GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago
I don't care: I can administer with relatively high confidence any Redhat- or Debian-derivate. Thanks to systems. Most issues regarding systemd I encountered were due to a halfway adoption (Debian). Some things like timers are a bit more cumbersome than "the old way", but I wouldn't want to miss the added robustness. Most things systemd implements lead to _less_ issues. And writing a systemd unit is pretty easy, contrary to the old bash script mess. So, no. Keep your Poettering-Bashing to yourself. I'd rather invest the time in geokking the systemd choices deeper.
- jackielii 9mo ago
  Well said!
- McDyver 9mo ago
  That's good for you! Isn't that a selfish view, though? "Works for me,so I don't care that systemd is creating dependencies everywhere for everyone else". I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives. Isn't linux about choice? It feels we're going on a downwards spiral where choice is being taken away from us in every domain
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    How is it someone's else's fault for that systemd has dependencies or that others depend on systemd? If I use and like Firefox, and others depend on Firefox, or Firefox depend on others, then it's Firefox fault for you choosing Firefox? I really don't understand the argument you're trying to make. You had choices before systemd, and you still have choices even though systemd is widespread, what's the problem? It isn't modular enough? Use something else then that is modular.
    - blell 9mo ago
      Red Hat created hard dependencies on systemd in all of the popular software they develop to ensure its adoption.
dingdingdang 9mo ago
I use another distro but totally appreciate the effort to keep different branches of potential futures alive. Humans have a tendency, in tech and most other domains afaict, to put a lot of eggs in one basket because it's easier/allows-faster-moving-forward.. but that basket may have structural weaknesses that only shows once it has A LOT of eggs in it.
- lillecarl 9mo ago
  Yep, the Linux kernel comes to mind. There are niche alternatives but mostly everyone settles on Linux as their kernel because it's easier and allows moving faster forwards.
gsich 9mo ago
who would use this?
- ZiiS 9mo ago
  Very resource constrained systems, systems where consistent admin between *BSD and Linux is important. Containers where you have reasons to break the single process practice.
- junaru 9mo ago
  Your phone. Haven't looked into Android images for at least a decade but it was just simple bash scripts back then.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - gsich 9mo ago
    My phone does not run Devuan.
- fmlpp 9mo ago
  People who hate idiots that put the verb before the noun.
egorfine 9mo ago
As a passionate systemd hater I still will not go back to using older bash-based initsystems and thus devuan. I strongly believe that systemd brand is a worst thing that happened to Linux, hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space, but at the same time I have to admit that systemd-as-pid1 is the best init system out there.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space What "innovations" have been prevented or hindered by systemd? I guess you could argue "well, we can't know" but then what is the argument here really? I'm guessing there is something concrete your thinking about here, that systemd made impossible, but I'm not understanding what you're referencing, I can't recall anything like that.
  - blueflow 9mo ago
    alternate libc's like musl. the eglibc controversy showed this was necessary but poettering initially refused to support a "non-useful libc". his words.
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      But musl exists today? And even I use it from time to time, mostly I think in Alpine Linux. How was musl hindered if we can use it? Maybe it isn't as popular as you would have wanted, but I don't think that's the same as claiming it's been hindered by systemd.
      - egorfine 9mo ago
        > But musl exists today Yes and the systemd crowd wants to embrace and extinguish it as well [1] [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS
        9mo ago
Shorel 9mo ago
It should use some modern alternative, no old bash scripts. Even the defunct Upstart is better than what's in Devuan.
andrewstuart 9mo ago
So how do you configure it? Just through some random mess of unintegrated incomplete long abandoned half baked subsystems? I really want to know, what do you use instead?
- nulbyte 9mo ago
  A quick perusal of the site yields this page, which tells you what it uses by default: sysvinit. https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom It lists other options. It also lists other operating systems that don't use systemd. I think what I hate most about systemd is that it has seemingly indoctrinated so many into believing that there are no viable alternatives, only some random mess of unintegrated incomplete long abandoned half-baked subsystems.
dashzebra 9mo ago
Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Many of us starting using Linux before systemd was a thing, and you get used to what you use, so when something new appears that are trying (well, in this case "tried and succeeded at") to replace a bunch of stuff, there is a natural push-back against it. I think systemd also took a relatively non-unixy approach, where it's a big stack to adopt, rather than individual programs that work together well. Typically, we prefer the latter instead of the former, so some pushback is because of that too.
  - blueflow 9mo ago
    Initially i hated systemd for the change it bought and lennarts behavior, but today I'm wiser. Today i hate systemd for its bad debugability (edit unit & daemon-reload loops), the lockups that happen whenever there is a fifo in the wrong place, and the processes that systemd spawns with no apparent related unit and without means to mask them. And the difficult to disable suspends on machines that never had any business suspending.
    - bandrami 9mo ago
      It's that lack of visibility that still makes me low-key hate it, though it's no longer the part of the modern Linux ecosystem that I hate most so I mostly just accept that it's part of watching a platform I used to really like enshittenate itself.
    - hiciu 9mo ago
      Could you please expand bit more about those processes that systemd spawns without units? Cgroups in Linux kernel, and systemd-cgls tool should let you trace every process to a source
      - blueflow 9mo ago
antonyh 9mo ago
Love/hate systemd as I might, it's been rock solid everywhere I've used it, and I've used it heavily. It has it's quirks, as does the init-scripts that came before, and launchd on OSX (not sure what the modern equivalent is for MacOS). However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log. All things being equal I'd rather deal with human readable files.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log Yeah, I also wish that at least was an option, would make some things easier. Also wished the remote log sending was easier, not sure if it's just me but was a huge hassle to setup properly, and really hard to properly validate it works as expected in all cases. Finally got it working, but it isn't as easy as the other parts of systemd/journald.
  - antonyh 9mo ago
    It should have been an option, even dumb old CSV if it needed structured data. I didn't bother trying to natively ship and used promtail instead, to get it into Loki, so I could query via Grafana.
- e2le 9mo ago
  Personally I would much rather they had simply used an existing database file format. For example, sqlite3 which is robust and already present in the default installation of most Linux distributions. Querying system logs with SQL would be cool and make things a bit easier unlike the sd_journal API with it's strange/bizarre quirks.
  - antonyh 9mo ago
    Wow what an idea, that would work so well and give me a trivial way to build apps to do alerts, monitoring, shipping to remotes, and whatnot in virtually any language.
  - 9mo ago
IshKebab 9mo ago
Why though? Systemd has been a huge success, dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the modern world.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Some people try to run Linux on Apple hardware, don't ask me, some people seem to be "technical masochists" :)
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Indeed, as mentioned in another comment, all major UNIXes already had something similar in place.
- t43562 9mo ago
  It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. Binary logs are a sort of example of the attitude it has. That's why there has been kicking and screaming that you mention. I have lots of 30-year old books on "Modern XXX" which makes you realise that the label is a bit meaningless. To put it another way, there are 30 year old operating systems with a much more "modern" design than Linux has...and we're not using them. It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows.
  - IshKebab 9mo ago
    > It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. The UNIX philosophy is not a golden rule or inherently good. Nor is it even really well defined (what is a "thing"?). SystemD does one thing and does it well - managing Linux systems. > It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows. Just because modernity isn't the only criteria for success doesn't mean it is irrelevant.
    - t43562 9mo ago
      What you define as "one thing" is not seen as one thing by those of us that aren't systemd fans. That's all it is really.
pjmlp 9mo ago
While other UNIX derived OSes have adopted similar systems before systemd was a thing, in Linux continues to be a drama. It is like the cult of "The UNIX Philosophy" hardly found in any commercial UNIX that spun out of AT&T UNIX System V.
Crontab 9mo ago
I have to admit to still having some philosophical discomfort over SystemD as I feel that it encompasses too much functionality. That said, it does work and that is probably the most important thing.
- ValdikSS 9mo ago
  Linux (the kernel) has LOTS of functionality anyone barely use or even know. Without that, there's no tooling around this functionality, no adoption. Not even all TCP socket options (setsockopt) are documented! Systemd pushed forward proper usage of capabilities, better watchdogs (in a broader sense, as systemd supports all kinds of them), isolation, policies, and so on and so forth. You need it all to efficiently control the daemons, and it's great when it's all available in a single suite.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Because of SystemD, you can't use Linux control groups. On systemd systems, only systemd is allowed to touch control groups. I think they even tried to make the kernel enforce this but they failed, so now it just breaks systemd if you do.
- t43562 9mo ago
  There are other things just work too.
maximgeorge 9mo ago
[dead]
propmaster 9mo ago
In my job, I often release Linux services integrated with systemd and I like it more than the old init system. My problems with systemd is the bloatware, not init related, that comes with it in modern Linux distributions. In my perception systemd people doesn't respect the freedom of choice of the users, the right to simply switch off features they find useless, annoying or simply they don't want in their workflow for any reason. I have a personal wiki related to the preparation of the development server or PC I personally use and the large majority of the chapters are related to the systemd features I need or want to remove and often that is a pain. I would like to see the users' right to NOT use given secondary feature respected, giving them the capability to easily remove or disable them without side effects, for example, in the OS installer, to have the power to deselect features, having alternative options like "manual operation" (i.e. DNS, I should be able to disable the option opting for manual configuration using resolv.conf, just as example). Even better, the possibility to have an input configuration file with all your options so that them will be applied automatically during the installation. IMHO, if all the distributions enforce the systemd way to do anything , we have a monopoly and monopolies are never good.
- 112233 8mo ago
  But why is there no such pushback agains linux kernel? What makes that monolith you cannot customize different enough from systemd? What if I don't want to use in-kernel usb stack, or audit, or key management, or LSM modules, or ELF binfmt support, or filesystems — you are forced by the distro to use all those features. Yet with systemd it's somehow different. I'm genuinely curious
  - zx8080 8mo ago
    For kernel, anyone is able to change flags and recompile and run it in a few mins. It is possible and well documented. It's very much not the same situation for systemd.
    - 112233 8mo ago
      So your point is distros provide dedicated tooling for simple recompiling of kernel (that is different from other distro packages), but do not have dedicated tooling for systemd? Fair point, but does not address the kernel being orders of magnitude bigger monolith than systemd. Say you disabled LSM, rebuilt, now all stuff that requires Selinux does not work. Now what?
JCattheATM 9mo ago
Devuan is my go to if I need a mainline distro without systemd, but honestly I just use Alpine for everything, even my desktop. People have this idea that it's only for containers, but that isn't so - its package library has everything you could need well maintained. I like the tools better than void, and prefer the release model to that of Artix/Arch.
hiprob 9mo ago
My way or the highway. Classic RedHat (and GNOME, GTK, etc etc)
eimrine 9mo ago
What is the newest laptop which can use S-states under Devuan? My 11-gen can not.
cykros 9mo ago
Debian without systemd is a good start. Now, do Debian without dpkg, and you may finally be getting somewhere. The reason Debian fell to the systemd behemoth is because its sysvinit scripts were already a complete disaster. Slackware and Gentoo, on the other hand, were able to stay clear of the mess because they had a decent implementation to begin with. And Sysvinit was never the only place Debian kept its mess.
- andor 9mo ago
  Yeah, that's why Slackware and Gentoo have a much larger userbase than Debian :-D
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
    Last time I checked, ChromeOS is a gentoo derivative that doesn't use systemd, so yes this but unironically.
    - hoherd 9mo ago
      Huh, TIL. > ChromeOS (sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS) is a proprietary operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS operating system (which itself is derived from Gentoo Linux) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS
      - direwolf20 9mo ago
        It sort of makes sense. Gentoo is basically automated Linux From Scratch — you can make anything. It's like Yocto/OpenEmbedded but for PCs. It even uses the same language.

87 points by smartmic 9mo ago

I haven't used Devuan for a while but I use another systemd-free distro and I think all such distros have benefited from work that Devuan has done to keep the option on the table. I think you can even get my favorite init system on Devuan now - dinit. It has a simple and useful service file format that's trivial to use and it can monitor and restart processes and users can use it for starting up their daemons etc - BUT it doesn't take over the world and the log file formats are all text.

saidnooneever 9mo ago

never used this one but glad to see systemd free stuff. definitely interested to try thanks for sharin!

_flux 9mo ago

It seems though not having systemd in it would be against "init freedom": https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom . Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

imp0cat 9mo ago
Yep, no "unnecessary entanglements" evidently (their words, not mine).
- LooseMarmoset 9mo ago
  > Unnecessary entanglements The problems with systemd are: * that once it was adopted, every single package started requiring it * which meant that packages that previously could run everywhere, now could only run on systemd-based systems * binary logs - a solution that solved nothing but created problems * which locked out any system that wasn't linux * which locked out any linux system that didn't want to use it * which led to abominations like systemd-resolved * "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else *can* be used. literally everything the systemD crowd has done leads to lockout and loss of choice. All ramrodded through by IBM/RedHat. The systemD developers don't care about any of this, of course. They've got a long history of breaking user space and poor dev practices because they're systemD. I mean, their attitude was so bad they got one of their principal devs kicked from the kernel because they overloaded the use of the kernel boot parameter "debug", which flooded the console, and refused to modify the debug option to something compatible like "systemd.debug", broke literally every other system, and then told everybody else "hey we're not wrong, the rest of the world is wrong." And this has been their attitude since then. Look, if people want to use systemD, that's just fine. But it is a fact that the entire development process for systemD is predicated on making Linux incompatible with anything else, which is an entire inversion of how Linux and Free Software works. I actually like unit files. But if systemD was just an init system, it would stop there.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    > * "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else can be used. You're saying that because the person who made systemd now work on hardware attestation, all Linux distributions will eventually require remote hardware attestation, where users don't actually have the keys? Maybe I'm naive, maybe I trust my distribution too much (Arch btw), but I don't see that happening. Probably Ubuntu and some other more commercial OSes might, but we'll still have choices in what OS/distribution to use, so just "vote with your partitions" or whatever.
    - LooseMarmoset 9mo ago
      If you build remote attestation into your product, corporate entities will require it. Just look at Android - What phones today give you unlimited root? If you have rooted, what applications have you broken? If you root, what e-fuses have you blown in your CPU meaning it can never be un-rooted? Android, at the start, was open and freely modified - not so much anymore. Companies like Google can and have cut off access to user's data, without recourse. You can't modify your phone, so you don't own your phone. You just pay rent until they don't support it anymore.
      - embedding-shape 9mo ago
        I think phones are a completely different beast though (and already a lost cause), PCs seems a lot more resilient to that sort of lock down. But on the other hand, you might be right, you never know how the future looks. But personally I'll wait until there is at least some signal that it's moving in that direction, before I start prepping for it to actually happening.
        LooseMarmoset 9mo ago
        Everything else has moved in that direction: * Literally every game console * Literally every smartphone * Microsoft, with their Win11 requirements, is moving there * John Deere (read on their own hardware attestation efforts to block DIY) * Car companies (require specialized tooling and software subscriptions to make certain repairs) * Anything that requires a signed bootloader and signed software updates * Snapdragon CPUs and e-fuses that burn when you use unsigned software, and brick * Apple hardware, literally crypto-signed so you can't use aftermarket parts * Google Chromecast * Amazon Kindle, locked hardware * IBM has locked hardware to their laptops for *years*. Ever try upgrading a wifi card in an IBM laptop? They're already invested in this the list goes on...of course it's coming to PC.
mdlxxv 9mo ago
Their criterion for an init system to qualify for this so-called "init freedom" seems to be "not being systemd".
PunchyHamster 9mo ago
they could've just cut out other systemd components (ntp, dns management etc) and use systemd The point of devuan is "we really do not like systemd". That's entire feature list
- t43562 9mo ago
  Why provide systemd if devuan is just debian with systemd alternatives? What would be the point - if you want systemd use debian?
Calzifer 9mo ago
> Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do? Reading the first sentence on that page was to much? "Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice." systemd fails on the portability criteria. Apart from that, why should they invest there limited time to include systemd? Devuan is Debian without systemd. If you want systemd install Debian.
direwolf20 9mo ago
A systemd distro tends to be locked to systemd, with many pieces of software requiring systemd to be running. An init–freedom distro avoids such dependencies. Presumably, you can still install systemd if you really want to.

baggy_trough 9mo ago

Always good to have options, but I'd personally never want to use a Linux without systemd.

phendrenad2 9mo ago

I like Devuan because it matches the Linux I learned - people who learned with a Systemd distro might not like it as much.

direwolf20 9mo ago
I can use systemd but it's always annoying to configure and sometimes randomly breaks and it's hard to know why. init.d scripts are no better, though. Runit is quite cool.
- j16sdiz 9mo ago
  runit is optional on Devuan.
MadnessASAP 9mo ago
I personally am very much happy that Linux is not like the Linux I learned. Slackware was an excellent learning experience and will always hold a dear place in my heart and memories, but not on any of my computers.
- fernandotakai 9mo ago
  same. i still remember how painful it was to setup services without systemd. having to manually deal with daemons was so painful, to the point of being exoteric.
  - Tistron 9mo ago
    Exoteric is the opposite of esoteric, which is the word you mean :)
  - claudex 9mo ago
    The worst was editing an existing service for the distribution. With systemd you just need an override file, without, you have to patch the file and review it each time it is upgraded to check the differences.

remix2000 9mo ago

"Tricycle – Car Without Engine" Honestly though, the argument against systemd is that it moves too much stuff into init, but I don't think it does enough of that, it's still extremely conservative, like, SD-DBus should be using binder x-port IMO.

XorNot 9mo ago
The thing is systemd really doesn't: the things people claim "shouldn't be in an init system" aren't - but there are systemd branded versions of a lot of basic facilities because you generally need something like them in a usable system. And a lot of those utilities are just straight better then the alternatives, or at least make a decent practicality vs correctness trade off for desktop Linux. systemd-cryptenroll for example is just straight up much easier to use for most applications of FDE, unless you're really doing network unlocking with something like Clevis.
account42 9mo ago
No, one complaint (out of many) against SystemD is that it moves too much complexity into PID 0 which is a very special process on Linux that must not crash ever or the whole system goes down with it. The init system is one thing that SystemD insists on running under PID 0 even though it could be designed otherwise.
- remix2000 9mo ago
  But PID 0 on Linux is the idle task…? Init is (usually) PID 1, PID 0 kinda just means that nothing is running on a given CPU (with caveats), also killing 0 has special meaning because well it's not a real process…
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Nitpicking. Of course they meant PID 1.
teddyh 9mo ago
Systemd seemd to be moving away from D-Bus and adopting varlink instead.

GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago

I don't care: I can administer with relatively high confidence any Redhat- or Debian-derivate. Thanks to systems. Most issues regarding systemd I encountered were due to a halfway adoption (Debian). Some things like timers are a bit more cumbersome than "the old way", but I wouldn't want to miss the added robustness. Most things systemd implements lead to _less_ issues. And writing a systemd unit is pretty easy, contrary to the old bash script mess. So, no. Keep your Poettering-Bashing to yourself. I'd rather invest the time in geokking the systemd choices deeper.

jackielii 9mo ago
Well said!
McDyver 9mo ago
That's good for you! Isn't that a selfish view, though? "Works for me,so I don't care that systemd is creating dependencies everywhere for everyone else". I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives. Isn't linux about choice? It feels we're going on a downwards spiral where choice is being taken away from us in every domain
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  How is it someone's else's fault for that systemd has dependencies or that others depend on systemd? If I use and like Firefox, and others depend on Firefox, or Firefox depend on others, then it's Firefox fault for you choosing Firefox? I really don't understand the argument you're trying to make. You had choices before systemd, and you still have choices even though systemd is widespread, what's the problem? It isn't modular enough? Use something else then that is modular.
  - blell 9mo ago
    Red Hat created hard dependencies on systemd in all of the popular software they develop to ensure its adoption.

dingdingdang 9mo ago

I use another distro but totally appreciate the effort to keep different branches of potential futures alive. Humans have a tendency, in tech and most other domains afaict, to put a lot of eggs in one basket because it's easier/allows-faster-moving-forward.. but that basket may have structural weaknesses that only shows once it has A LOT of eggs in it.

lillecarl 9mo ago
Yep, the Linux kernel comes to mind. There are niche alternatives but mostly everyone settles on Linux as their kernel because it's easier and allows moving faster forwards.

gsich 9mo ago

who would use this?

ZiiS 9mo ago
Very resource constrained systems, systems where consistent admin between *BSD and Linux is important. Containers where you have reasons to break the single process practice.
junaru 9mo ago
Your phone. Haven't looked into Android images for at least a decade but it was just simple bash scripts back then.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- gsich 9mo ago
  My phone does not run Devuan.
fmlpp 9mo ago
People who hate idiots that put the verb before the noun.

egorfine 9mo ago

As a passionate systemd hater I still will not go back to using older bash-based initsystems and thus devuan. I strongly believe that systemd brand is a worst thing that happened to Linux, hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space, but at the same time I have to admit that systemd-as-pid1 is the best init system out there.

embedding-shape 9mo ago
> hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space What "innovations" have been prevented or hindered by systemd? I guess you could argue "well, we can't know" but then what is the argument here really? I'm guessing there is something concrete your thinking about here, that systemd made impossible, but I'm not understanding what you're referencing, I can't recall anything like that.
- blueflow 9mo ago
  alternate libc's like musl. the eglibc controversy showed this was necessary but poettering initially refused to support a "non-useful libc". his words.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    But musl exists today? And even I use it from time to time, mostly I think in Alpine Linux. How was musl hindered if we can use it? Maybe it isn't as popular as you would have wanted, but I don't think that's the same as claiming it's been hindered by systemd.
    - egorfine 9mo ago
      > But musl exists today Yes and the systemd crowd wants to embrace and extinguish it as well [1] [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS
      - 9mo ago

Shorel 9mo ago

It should use some modern alternative, no old bash scripts. Even the defunct Upstart is better than what's in Devuan.

andrewstuart 9mo ago

So how do you configure it? Just through some random mess of unintegrated incomplete long abandoned half baked subsystems? I really want to know, what do you use instead?

nulbyte 9mo ago
A quick perusal of the site yields this page, which tells you what it uses by default: sysvinit. https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom It lists other options. It also lists other operating systems that don't use systemd. I think what I hate most about systemd is that it has seemingly indoctrinated so many into believing that there are no viable alternatives, only some random mess of unintegrated incomplete long abandoned half-baked subsystems.

dashzebra 9mo ago

Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?

embedding-shape 9mo ago
Many of us starting using Linux before systemd was a thing, and you get used to what you use, so when something new appears that are trying (well, in this case "tried and succeeded at") to replace a bunch of stuff, there is a natural push-back against it. I think systemd also took a relatively non-unixy approach, where it's a big stack to adopt, rather than individual programs that work together well. Typically, we prefer the latter instead of the former, so some pushback is because of that too.
- blueflow 9mo ago
  Initially i hated systemd for the change it bought and lennarts behavior, but today I'm wiser. Today i hate systemd for its bad debugability (edit unit & daemon-reload loops), the lockups that happen whenever there is a fifo in the wrong place, and the processes that systemd spawns with no apparent related unit and without means to mask them. And the difficult to disable suspends on machines that never had any business suspending.
  - bandrami 9mo ago
    It's that lack of visibility that still makes me low-key hate it, though it's no longer the part of the modern Linux ecosystem that I hate most so I mostly just accept that it's part of watching a platform I used to really like enshittenate itself.
  - hiciu 9mo ago
    Could you please expand bit more about those processes that systemd spawns without units? Cgroups in Linux kernel, and systemd-cgls tool should let you trace every process to a source
    - blueflow 9mo ago

antonyh 9mo ago

Love/hate systemd as I might, it's been rock solid everywhere I've used it, and I've used it heavily. It has it's quirks, as does the init-scripts that came before, and launchd on OSX (not sure what the modern equivalent is for MacOS). However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log. All things being equal I'd rather deal with human readable files.

embedding-shape 9mo ago
> However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log Yeah, I also wish that at least was an option, would make some things easier. Also wished the remote log sending was easier, not sure if it's just me but was a huge hassle to setup properly, and really hard to properly validate it works as expected in all cases. Finally got it working, but it isn't as easy as the other parts of systemd/journald.
- antonyh 9mo ago
  It should have been an option, even dumb old CSV if it needed structured data. I didn't bother trying to natively ship and used promtail instead, to get it into Loki, so I could query via Grafana.
e2le 9mo ago
Personally I would much rather they had simply used an existing database file format. For example, sqlite3 which is robust and already present in the default installation of most Linux distributions. Querying system logs with SQL would be cool and make things a bit easier unlike the sd_journal API with it's strange/bizarre quirks.
- antonyh 9mo ago
  Wow what an idea, that would work so well and give me a trivial way to build apps to do alerts, monitoring, shipping to remotes, and whatnot in virtually any language.
- 9mo ago

IshKebab 9mo ago

Why though? Systemd has been a huge success, dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the modern world.

embedding-shape 9mo ago
Some people try to run Linux on Apple hardware, don't ask me, some people seem to be "technical masochists" :)
pjmlp 9mo ago
Indeed, as mentioned in another comment, all major UNIXes already had something similar in place.
t43562 9mo ago
It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. Binary logs are a sort of example of the attitude it has. That's why there has been kicking and screaming that you mention. I have lots of 30-year old books on "Modern XXX" which makes you realise that the label is a bit meaningless. To put it another way, there are 30 year old operating systems with a much more "modern" design than Linux has...and we're not using them. It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows.
- IshKebab 9mo ago
  > It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. The UNIX philosophy is not a golden rule or inherently good. Nor is it even really well defined (what is a "thing"?). SystemD does one thing and does it well - managing Linux systems. > It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows. Just because modernity isn't the only criteria for success doesn't mean it is irrelevant.
  - t43562 9mo ago
    What you define as "one thing" is not seen as one thing by those of us that aren't systemd fans. That's all it is really.

pjmlp 9mo ago

While other UNIX derived OSes have adopted similar systems before systemd was a thing, in Linux continues to be a drama. It is like the cult of "The UNIX Philosophy" hardly found in any commercial UNIX that spun out of AT&T UNIX System V.

Crontab 9mo ago

I have to admit to still having some philosophical discomfort over SystemD as I feel that it encompasses too much functionality. That said, it does work and that is probably the most important thing.

ValdikSS 9mo ago
Linux (the kernel) has LOTS of functionality anyone barely use or even know. Without that, there's no tooling around this functionality, no adoption. Not even all TCP socket options (setsockopt) are documented! Systemd pushed forward proper usage of capabilities, better watchdogs (in a broader sense, as systemd supports all kinds of them), isolation, policies, and so on and so forth. You need it all to efficiently control the daemons, and it's great when it's all available in a single suite.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  Because of SystemD, you can't use Linux control groups. On systemd systems, only systemd is allowed to touch control groups. I think they even tried to make the kernel enforce this but they failed, so now it just breaks systemd if you do.
t43562 9mo ago
There are other things just work too.

maximgeorge 9mo ago

[dead]

propmaster 9mo ago

In my job, I often release Linux services integrated with systemd and I like it more than the old init system. My problems with systemd is the bloatware, not init related, that comes with it in modern Linux distributions. In my perception systemd people doesn't respect the freedom of choice of the users, the right to simply switch off features they find useless, annoying or simply they don't want in their workflow for any reason. I have a personal wiki related to the preparation of the development server or PC I personally use and the large majority of the chapters are related to the systemd features I need or want to remove and often that is a pain. I would like to see the users' right to NOT use given secondary feature respected, giving them the capability to easily remove or disable them without side effects, for example, in the OS installer, to have the power to deselect features, having alternative options like "manual operation" (i.e. DNS, I should be able to disable the option opting for manual configuration using resolv.conf, just as example). Even better, the possibility to have an input configuration file with all your options so that them will be applied automatically during the installation. IMHO, if all the distributions enforce the systemd way to do anything , we have a monopoly and monopolies are never good.

112233 8mo ago
But why is there no such pushback agains linux kernel? What makes that monolith you cannot customize different enough from systemd? What if I don't want to use in-kernel usb stack, or audit, or key management, or LSM modules, or ELF binfmt support, or filesystems — you are forced by the distro to use all those features. Yet with systemd it's somehow different. I'm genuinely curious
- zx8080 8mo ago
  For kernel, anyone is able to change flags and recompile and run it in a few mins. It is possible and well documented. It's very much not the same situation for systemd.
  - 112233 8mo ago
    So your point is distros provide dedicated tooling for simple recompiling of kernel (that is different from other distro packages), but do not have dedicated tooling for systemd? Fair point, but does not address the kernel being orders of magnitude bigger monolith than systemd. Say you disabled LSM, rebuilt, now all stuff that requires Selinux does not work. Now what?

JCattheATM 9mo ago

Devuan is my go to if I need a mainline distro without systemd, but honestly I just use Alpine for everything, even my desktop. People have this idea that it's only for containers, but that isn't so - its package library has everything you could need well maintained. I like the tools better than void, and prefer the release model to that of Artix/Arch.

hiprob 9mo ago

My way or the highway. Classic RedHat (and GNOME, GTK, etc etc)

eimrine 9mo ago

What is the newest laptop which can use S-states under Devuan? My 11-gen can not.

cykros 9mo ago

Debian without systemd is a good start. Now, do Debian without dpkg, and you may finally be getting somewhere. The reason Debian fell to the systemd behemoth is because its sysvinit scripts were already a complete disaster. Slackware and Gentoo, on the other hand, were able to stay clear of the mess because they had a decent implementation to begin with. And Sysvinit was never the only place Debian kept its mess.

andor 9mo ago
Yeah, that's why Slackware and Gentoo have a much larger userbase than Debian :-D
- yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
  Last time I checked, ChromeOS is a gentoo derivative that doesn't use systemd, so yes this but unironically.
  - hoherd 9mo ago
    Huh, TIL. > ChromeOS (sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS) is a proprietary operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS operating system (which itself is derived from Gentoo Linux) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      It sort of makes sense. Gentoo is basically automated Linux From Scratch — you can make anything. It's like Yocto/OpenEmbedded but for PCs. It even uses the same language.