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Debian supports sysvinit _scripts_, it does _not_ support not using SystemD. A huge number of packages indirectly depend on it. If it were merely optional, people would not have had to fork Devuan, you'd just see suggestions to run apt get remove systemd.

May I humbly suggest Devuan? It eschews fashion in favor of function.

"It Just Works", and the Xfce desktop just gets out of the way so I can get real work done.

Same here. I've got a laptop with what I expect to be my last Windows install--and it only exists to run a Debian VM right now. Windows 7 is the end of the road for me.

I'm also kicking the Debian habit because it's become impossible to avoid systemd. Once that box dies, it's getting replaced with a Devuan box. I've invested some time recently in brushing up on OpenBSD, and that's my new solution for servers.

*nix wasn't broke. Didn't need fixing. Windows was tolerably useful, didn't need fixing, but they broke it anyway. I'm not unwilling to pay for software--I'm unwilling to pay for garbage I don't own. That's why Devuan and the OpenBSD Foundation made my list for donations over the holidays.

> Get me a poettering-free linux with a non-stupid X and a decent
> browser. Can you do it with an established distribution at all or
> is it linux-from-scratch time with a whole lot of work tacked on top?

Gentoo https://gentoo.org/get-started... has systemd as an option, not a requirement. If that's too much like LFS for you, there's Devuan https://devuan.org/ which was forked from Debian. Like Debian, it is also the base for several specialized spin-offs https://devuan.org/os/partners...

> Get me a poettering-free linux with a non-stupid X and a decent
> browser. Can you do it with an established distribution at all or
> is it linux-from-scratch time with a whole lot of work tacked on top?

Gentoo https://gentoo.org/get-started... has systemd as an option, not a requirement. If that's too much like LFS for you, there's Devuan https://devuan.org/ which was forked from Debian. Like Debian, it is also the base for several specialized spin-offs https://devuan.org/os/partners...

While not a failed mount, I just ran into this shutdown issue yesterday.

Clean Debian 9 install into a newly created VirtualBox VM.

You are certainly not the first person to claim I fucked something up, but I am really really hoping you will be the first to tell me exactly what above was the fuckup and hopefully what to do instead. (Emphasis added)

Use Devuan instead of Debian.

Yeah, all the highly skilled sysadmins updated their startup scripts years ago to start under systemd. It's only the lazy weak sysadmins who have spent the last four of five years whining that systemd once broke a script somewhere.

The highly skilled admins forked Debian, to create Devuan, a Debian free of systemd.

Yeah, all the highly skilled sysadmins updated their startup scripts years ago to start under systemd. It's only the lazy weak sysadmins who have spent the last four of five years whining that systemd once broke a script somewhere.

The highly skilled admins forked Debian, to create Devuan, a Debian free of systemd.

I do hate this defetist attitude. You use Debian without systemd (I do). You can turn to Devuan Or Slackware. In any case, if you characterize yourself as "professional", contribute to one of those options if you want to keep systemd-free Linux distros viable, instead of whining.

That's how it works around here.

And then systemd arrived.

And then Debian was forked to make Devuan.

FluXuan Is very light on resources. Boot to desktop and its using 68M only.
Based on Devuan Ascii, you'll be at home if you are used to how Debian used to be, without the bloat.

Of course you could also just use Devuan with your favorite wm.

If you don't mind being on the leading edge, there is also Void, which not being based on any other distro, doesn't have to share a sudden termination of 32 bit support.

There are still many alternatives suitable for old hardware, perhaps take a look at Distrowatch.

--Bruce, in all seriousness I'd like to donate an old dual-core PC that I made into a ZFS server to the Devuan project

Terrifying that you'd consider ZFS on Devuan, considering this. Why I know about that ticket: when considering non-systemd-based Linux distros that could run ZFS, I looked into Devuan and wondered "how good" its ZFS support was, found that, shook my head. In case you're wondering what's contained there: ZFS pools aren't imported (i.e. auto-mounted) by the OS on boot.

I'm equally perplexed by the fact that the Devuan ZFS maintainer appears to be a single person who hasn't worked on tickets in a year and a half.

So yeah, for ZFS, better stick to a distro that's maintained, ex. Ubuntu. I say that as someone who agrees deeply that systemd is awful; sometimes you have to be pragmatic and make compromises.

P.S. This comment comes to you from someone running FreeBSD, which is systemd-free but has been turning into a junk pile over the past several releases. Too bad DragonflyBSD doesn't have ZFS support (not interested in HAMMER, sorry).

--Bruce, in all seriousness I'd like to donate an old dual-core PC that I made into a ZFS server to the Devuan project

Terrifying that you'd consider ZFS on Devuan, considering this. Why I know about that ticket: when considering non-systemd-based Linux distros that could run ZFS, I looked into Devuan and wondered "how good" its ZFS support was, found that, shook my head. In case you're wondering what's contained there: ZFS pools aren't imported (i.e. auto-mounted) by the OS on boot.

I'm equally perplexed by the fact that the Devuan ZFS maintainer appears to be a single person who hasn't worked on tickets in a year and a half.

So yeah, for ZFS, better stick to a distro that's maintained, ex. Ubuntu. I say that as someone who agrees deeply that systemd is awful; sometimes you have to be pragmatic and make compromises.

P.S. This comment comes to you from someone running FreeBSD, which is systemd-free but has been turning into a junk pile over the past several releases. Too bad DragonflyBSD doesn't have ZFS support (not interested in HAMMER, sorry).

Devuan is a most useful up(!)grade from Debian which is systemd free and has a mindset that will resist this nonsense too. I'm using it on embedded devices, servers and as my desktop environment - the only exception being my Android/Chromebook devices. http://devuan.org/

Anyhow, those who give a shit are long gone to FreeBSD or other greener pastures, myself included.

Speaking of greener pastures, there is a new Release Candidate for Devuan ASCII.

Not trying to start a flame war even remotely, but nothing in your reply refutes the fact that the licensing is why these companies choose the BSDs. They don't pick BSD for superiority; Legal likes BSD license because it's compatible with IP, while GPL inherently isn't. I'll even add Netflix into the company list: they use FreeBSD on very specific back-end machines (and very few of them), but everything else is Linux (this comes from someone who actually works there).

FreeBSD was a good solid OS in the 4.x days, possibly lingering into the 9.x days. 10.x onward are pretty bad (you need to follow commits and mailing lists to understand these claims. They are not without merit). One of the worst problems introduced in 10.x is how load average is completely unreliable, which is still there as of 12.x/HEAD, despite the problem being 100% reproducible on both bare metal and VMs. DragonflyBSD is more promising in the sense that it's based on the development approach of 4.x and massively improved to work with present-day systems, hardware, and needs (Matt Dillon was one of the first people to track down the Ryzen bug); several FreeBSD committers (src and ports) switched many years ago for a multitude of reasons (some political). Instead in FreeBSD, people focus on mission-critical things like breaking ABI compatibility because the word rendezvous was spelled rendevous. There are only a couple kernel developers who remain that are of high quality: Konstantin Belousov and John Baldwin are two main ones; Warner Losh still lingers somewhere and comments on proposed the quality of proposed commits, and Alexander Motin does good work on storage subsystems and ZFS but his other stuff is questionable. Go through svn-src-all sometime and you'll see the names are few and far between compared to olden days.

Modern Linux (I am talking about the kernel/OS, not userland, and not a distribution!) is substantially better, and actually supported by device vendors for device drivers and kernel-level software. I name some names later.

GNOME and KDE and Wayland aren't relevant to any of the companies I listed and what products they make that use BSD, apparently with the exception of Citrix (I'm only familiar with their NetScaler devices, which were originally from the company of the same name (Citrix bought them in 2005)). These companies are using BSD kernel and partial userland (i.e. not ports/packages), plus their own in-house-developed binaries.

systemd isn't a requirement for Linux (though I fully agree it's a travesty and should be abolished, and am also terrified of how fast it was adopted across so many major distros), but there are distros which don't use it. I will admit that the downside to using one of these less-known distros is that their general support is worse; for example, Devuan, the Debian fork that lacks systemd, has questionable ZFS support (and its ZFS maintainer is some guy who sounds like he should be on a hacker's IRC channel). I would really love to know why so many distros switched, including some which were server-focused; OpenRC really seems like it's suitable for both servers and desktops. As someone who had to migrate EC2 servers running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with in-house Upstart scripts to 16.04 LTS, I've really learned to hate systemd. Hours of my life and time absolutely wasted. But the kernel is still good.

ifconfig is userland, not kernel, but I agree it's "deprecation" (for the ip(8) command) is silly, but this is a per-distro thing (many distros still include it). In contrast, remember when ISC tri

... if we can just get an Ubuntu without systemd based on Devuan instead of Debian!

I'll take forced updates over a forced migration to systemd any day of the millenium.

Debian without systemd: Devuan

I looked at Devuan. It's not an option. It's an amateurish side project, from what I could see. I can't trust it to be around next month, nevermind a few years from now. At least the FreeBSD project has a mature, helpful community with a long track record of doing great work. I can trust the FreeBSD project. I can't trust the Devuan project.

Devuan has existed for 3 years, since the Exodus Declaration in November 2014.
It is supported by the non-profit organization Dyne.org.
It will be here, tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade. Believe it.

You can find the Devuan community:
- On the Dev1 Galaxy forums.
- On the mailing lists at dyne.org
- On IRC, chat.freenode.net in the #devuan channel.

Devuan is small compared to Debian, but its users are happy and eagerly awaiting the release of Devuan 2.0 (Ascii).

More like Ubuntu? No Thanks. What a train wreck. They're still creating login problems and crap like that. Now I'm running Debian without systemd and life is good.

Consider switching to Devuan when Devuan Ascii is released.

Debian is going to make it harder and harder to stay away from systemd as new releases come out.

For example, the Debian packaging for redis dropped support for non-systemd init systems in Debian Buster (testing).

Note: Upstream redis still ships with support for SysV.

Linux isn't really an option, especially with so many distros including systemd. I hate to say this, but I've found Windows 10 to boot more reliably for me than the versions of Debian and Ubuntu that use systemd!

Umm... you do know there are distros that don't use Systemd, right? Hell, some were created specifically to NOT use Systemd. https://devuan.org/

With only hobbyist Linux distros now not forcing systemd on me, I've been forced to move to FreeBSD. It wasn't Microsoft that made me ditch Linux; it was the Linux community itself that did that.

Red Hat was patient zero, and infected both Arch and Debian.
Ubuntu contracted it from Debian.
Mint contracted it from Ubuntu.

There are quarantine zones where systemd dare not tread, and the number of survivors who reach them grows daily.

There are several great Linux distros without systemd:
Devuan (a fork; Debian without systemd)
Gobolinux
Void Linux

And of course the old guard distros that had natural immunity to systemd:
Gentoo
Slackware

Don't give up on Linux. It is more crucial than ever to group with other systemd survivors and lend support to those who still need to be evacuated from the contaminated distros.

Devuan
Assuming that you actually are looking for an answer and not just playing "Why don't you - yes but...".

Devuan: https://devuan.org/

Devuan is a fork of Debian which is systemd free. It just works for me. I've moved my servers to it. I am still vainly hoping that Ubuntu will announce it is abandoning systemd but I don't think that is going to happen so my desktop has already moved to Devuan & my laptop is going that way too. There are minor issues with the existing sysv init system which could have been improved a little, and improvements had arrived incrementally before systemd. The update-rc.d tool now takes notice of special comments in the init.d scripts so as to allow for parallel execution, and for dependencies, and the crafting of init.d scripts is not a black art: Nothing was broken. Having said that there is no need to have only one init system and various are available and Devuan supports them all except systemd. I warmly recommend Devuan. Stop complaining about systemd, leave it behind! https://devuan.org/

You could have prevented this.

https://debian.org/

Umm.. Fuck Debian, and its sucking Poetterings dick wrt systemd..

https://devuan.org/ .... Debian WITHOUT Poetterings shitbaby....

Systemd was just the final salvo in a long-running war on your freedom. Take a side and stop crying about it.

http://www.devuan.org/

Ubuntu sold out to systemd because Debian sold out to systemd.

You missed the part in the middle where they attempted writing "upstart" as their own local "NIH daemon starting/hardware up-bringing" init replacement.
And kept trying even after the rest of the Linux world standardized on systemd instead.

(Just like they kept trying bazaar, even after everybody else moved to git)
(Just like they decided to not follow the common Wayland efforts, but write their own Mir)
etc.

Ubuntu tried, but it didn't work well for them.
Everybody else tried systemd and it turned okay for them.

Otherwise, they would have had to do all the work Devuan is doing now, to remove needless systemd dependencies.

If it's so much effort removing, maybe systemd wasn't that much needless.

...why he sold out to systemd.

Ubuntu sold out to systemd because Debian sold out to systemd.

Otherwise, they would have had to do all the work Devuan is doing now, to remove needless systemd dependencies.

I'd still like to see an Ubuntu based on Devuan some day.

Well, it only took them one whole release to realize avconv was a mistake, but there is a lot more funding behind systemd, so I worry it may take longer.

Of course, if enough people start migrating to Devuan before Stretch is released, maybe they'll get a clue quicker.

Yes, it looks as though it'll be harder and harder to displace systemd from Linux distros with the defaulting to Gnome, with it's hardcoded dependencies. Long live Devuan Linux

Look, I'm sure some of you clicked on this post in bewilderment, expecting to see some hypocritical pro-Ubuntu argument from a known digerati eliteist here. You're not gonna find one. But the answer to the question is Ubuntu.

The problem is that the question is wrong. Like many such users, their actual biggest problem is just not knowing how to ask the right questions. The question "What's the easiest Linux distro for a newbie?" was formulated by someone who wanted a Linux distro that would not leave them running in terror, frightened and disgusted of all open source software forever. While Ubuntu (or Mint, or whatever... something even more absurd) may indeed be the easiest for new adopters to understand, it's a far cry from a good example of the pinnacle of quality in open source software that they want and need.

many of the distros that utilize systemd are excellent (even if you consider systemd to be a flaw)

Sure they are excellent, but for how much longer?

I'll stick with Mint 17.3 until Devuan Ascii comes out.

Linux Mint 17 was the last Mint without systemd.
Ubuntu 14 was the last Ubuntu LTS without systemd.
Debian 7 is the last Debian without systemd.

Beyond these versions, there are dragons.

Devuan 1.0 Jessie (Beta 2) was released last week.

I think a systemd-free Debian is the right way to go; systemd does have a lot of issues, enough to not have it be the default in a distribution that's more committed to software freedon and is managed democratically, like Debian. So, I support Devuan.

However, their website is just scary awful. Not that it isn't aesthetic, but they have some too-smart-for-their-own good website system. I haven't seen it anywhere else - perhaps it was developed by people related to the project itself? But, honestly - it's baroque; it's confusing; you can't figure out how to post what and where, and it lets you believe you might be able to post something only to be disappointed when it's not accepted. So not only is documentation lacking but it's also close to impossible to discuss anything (specifically problems you might be having with installation etc.)

So, dear Devuaners - stick to one major earth-shattering norm change, don't try to force your weird website management ideas onto us. If you had something like AskUbuntu.com or even the less-polished ask.libreoffice.org - that would be awesome.

BTW - It's interesting to note just how many packages you need to fork in order to make your Debian run without systemd.

Yes, its called Devuan.

"Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd."

In the meantime you may avoid using systemd as init in Debian by installing sysvinit-core or in Ubuntu by installing upstart-sysv in your transition to a systemd-less distro such as Devuan.

If you are using Debian Jessie, you can switch to Devuan by simply changing repositories. Its still in beta so don't do it on production servers yet. But do plan your migration, before this gets out of hand.

yadda yadda yadda.

Linux does not "force" you into anything: systemd is still optional and many linux distros run perfectly well without systemd (including my old friend Slackware).

And if you really don't like Linux, there is always the BSD. Nope, no systemd there, no sirree.

So anyway... yeah, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Debian is dead. The people left in charge have no scruples left and sold out to Red Hat, in a vain attempt to gain some material or organizational wealth from the now-inevitable buyout by Microsoft. Ian's work will be preserved though.

https://www.debian.org/
https://devuan.org/
http://redhat.com/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
https://www.suse.com/
https://getfedora.org/

To list just a few...

MS is just making the choice more binary - either you choose to let them do anything they want with your computer, or you choose to let them do NOTHING.

If we're using the full desktop DVD .iso file for Ubuntu 16.04 (amd64), and not the Ubuntu Core, Server, or netinstall images, then it's 1.4 GB.

Slackware 14.1 is 2.4 GB (source: http://www.slackware.com/getsl... )
FreeBSD is 2.7 GB (source: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/Free... )
Solaris 11.3 is 1.4 GB for the USB (source: http://www.oracle.com/technetw... )
Devuan beta is 4.36 GB (source: https://files.devuan.org/devua... )
Fedora 23 Workstation is 1.4 GB (source: https://getfedora.org/en/works... )

The current release series is ALPHA2 meaning not ready for production, mostly targeted to developers, contributors and testers.

Let this sink in: Given more than a year, "Devuan" could not so much as repackage a custom Debian stable image with minor customization at better than "alpha" quality.

Automated daily builds aside, their last "Alpha" release was six months ago . Because there is no technical need for its existence, Devuan is dying due to lack of interest among qualified programmers and system architechts. The shrill anti-systemd crowd is NOT made up of "veteran unix administrators". Would you all give it a REST already.

The current release series is ALPHA2 meaning not ready for production, mostly targeted to developers, contributors and testers.

Let this sink in: Given more than a year, "Devuan" could not so much as repackage a custom Debian stable image with minor customization at better than "alpha" quality.

Automated daily builds aside, their last "Alpha" release was six months ago . Because there is no technical need for its existence, Devuan is dying due to lack of interest among qualified programmers and system architechts. The shrill anti-systemd crowd is NOT made up of "veteran unix administrators". Would you all give it a REST already.

Devuan.

It's much faster and easier to cover everything in shit than it is to scrub it all away again.

The projects are out there, it just takes a little while to bootstrap. Meanwhile, I am working with Jessie and fvwm using sysv to avoid systemd to the extent possible. That is, where I haven't just stayed at wheezy for now.

For example, have a look at Devuan.org.

I'd remove systemd from Debian so that Debian became usable again.

Have you offered your support yet?
https://devuan.org/

I'm waitin on Devuan for this exact purpose

https://devuan.org/

Curious about your manipulation of to the Devuan project passing via a personal attack against me.

BTW are you Kevin McCurley of Digicrime, based in San Jose?

Isn't this game boring? Yet I have to reply because your claims about Devuan are false:

1- we don't demand no-one else should be able to use systemd. We clearly demand our own rights in choosing to not use systemd and have engaged in an honest quest developing a base system that is alternative to Debian and does not depends from the web of dependencies of systemd, including the init and the device manager.

2- our fund-raise is accountable, the financial responsibility is taken up by a non-profit organization registered since more than 10 years, our financial report is public and reasonably detailed http://devuan.org/donate

regards

There is Devuan, a fork of Debian without systemd. No release yet, but they hope to have one ready by the time jessie is released so a modern alternative will be available. https://devuan.org/

https://devuan.org/

But don't let facts stand in the way of your ranting.
It takes time to bring a fork to release-ready state. It would also be a lot better NOT to have to fork the whole distro just to avoid one package you don't like.

I don't have to switch distros if I would rather use nginx than apache for a specific job. There should be no reason I have to switch distros if I would rather dhcpcd than systemd's dhcp client, or indeed if I would rather use upstart than systemd.
Ironically debian has had support for different init systems and switching between them for years - systemd is UNIQUE in being the first and only time they added another init system option which removed the ability to choose NOT to use it and use one of the others instead.