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Devuan Releases Beta of Systemd-Free 'Debian Fork' Base System (devuan.org)
jaromil writes: Devuan beta is released today, following up the Debian fork declaration and progress made during the past two years. Devuan now provides an alternative upgrade path to Debian, and switching is easy from both Wheezy and Jessie. From The Register: "Devuan came into being after a rebellion by a self-described 'Veteran Unix Admin collective' argued that Debian had betrayed its roots and was becoming too desktop-oriented. The item to which they objected most vigorously was the inclusion of the systemd bootloader. The rebels therefore decided to fork Debian and 'preserve Init freedom.' The group renamed itself and its distribution 'Devuan' and got work, promising a fork that looked, felt, and quacked like Debian in all regards other than imposing systemd as the default Init option."
Nobody is against systemd just because it's change. People are against systemd because it is change that causes them many problems, including computers that don't boot.
Unless you can convert your binary to a stream of text, forget grepping it or doing any of the transformations everybody with a modicum of experience of *nix is very familiar with.
On the commandline, binary files are going to require a custom built interface for that specific type of binary. That custom built interface needs to have all the features you want for easy searching etc.: no regular expression search built-in? Then forget about it. If you're lucky, there is another tool that understands your specific binary flavour which may or may not do what you want.
A text file does not have those problems because it can be interpreted using a standard that is ridiculously simple, old as dirt and supported by and ingrained in pretty much fucking everything that displays letters.
I'm not saying a binary format cannot have its advantages (databases obviously have many), but to dismiss the difference between binaries and text files with 'you still need a tool to read them' is absolutely fucking idiotic.
There's only so much you can do to maintain software packages for an alternative. When a core system component deviates the way systems did you would have to dedicate an incredible amount of testing and modifying of packages to ensure the system doesn't randomly break. If you need to retest much of the system then it's just easier to maintain your own distribution.