Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Devuan's Systemd-Free Linux Hits Beta 2 (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the forking-the-road dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates writes, "For all the systemd haters who want a modern distro feel free to rejoice. The Debian fork called Devuan is almost done, completing a daunting task of stripping systemd dependencies from Debian." From The Register: Devuan came about after some users felt [Debian] had become too desktop-friendly. The change the greybeards objected to most was the decision to replace sysvinit init with systemd, a move felt to betray core Unix principles of user choice and keeping bloat to a bare minimum. Supporters of init freedom also dispute assertions that systemd is in all ways superior to sysvinit init, arguing that Debian ignored viable alternatives like sinit, openrc, runit, s6 and shepherd. All are therefore included in Devuan.
Devuan.org now features an "init freedom" logo with the tagline, "watching your first step. Their home page now links to the download site for Devuan Jessie 1.0 Beta2, promising an OS that "avoids entanglement".

15 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Init alternatives by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Do any of these alternatives offer the same speed benefit of systemd? Serious question as I've never tried to replace the init system on any linux distro.

    1. Re:Init alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And your non-systemd boot process will also be comprehensible and easy to troubleshoot.

    2. Re:Init alternatives by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The truth is that the boot speed improvements of systemd are effectively notional. The boot process is so fast now that starting in parallel only saves you time when something goes wrong. If you regularly have a problem during boot, then you should think about fixing that regardless of what your init system is.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:Init alternatives by Sarten-X · · Score: 4, Insightful

      With all due respect, that comparison is awful.

      In the effort to make an "apples to apples" comparison, it uses only the bare minimum of functionality from each toolset. There's no illustration of dependencies or capability control. It is useful for getting a rough idea of how the init systems' config files look, but not really as the basis for any kind of comparison, especially with regard to advanced features.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    4. Re:Init alternatives by Sarten-X · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It sounds like you should be looking into your high-availability architecture, not your init system.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    5. Re:Init alternatives by Sarten-X · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So let me get this straight... in order to say "Foo depends on some kind of bar, which happens to be baz on this system", I need to write a "bar" definition that actually runs "baz", and go modify a completely separate dependency file to add "foo".

      ...and you're suggesting this is clean?

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    6. Re:Init alternatives by fnj · · Score: 4, Insightful

      [OpenRC] supports parallel startup processes

      Except for one little problem. Gentoo Bug 391945: "boot can hang when rc_parallel=yes".

      Reported 2009. Current status 5 years later: "CONFIRMED".

    7. Re:Init alternatives by fnj · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In the spirit of "Do one thing and do it well", systemd's goal ...

      BWAHAHA!

    8. Re:Init alternatives by gweihir · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ok, that may waste time. Everybody knows that reinstalling is the way to go on boot-problems, right?

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    9. Re:Init alternatives by thegarbz · · Score: 1, Insightful

      And your non-systemd boot process will also be comprehensible and easy to troubleshoot.

      +5 Funny. Now if you'll excuse me I have to go back through hundreds of log files and filter through init scripts with 1000s of lines to find out why something's not working.

    10. Re:Init alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How come there is so much noise and heat about a small piece of software that runs maybe 2-3 times per year?

      Point is, it is neither small nor it runs only 2 to 3 times a years. It's starting to be a giant squid of interdependant parts (gnome depends on systemd now) that runs constantly (the init is always running, not just at boot), that is basically a kernel on top of the kernel, trying to control everything in userspace and "be the glu" between everything, and from which most people can't run from.

    11. Re:Init alternatives by pz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The biggest improvement over antique boot systems ...

      That there is the heart of the problem, an attitude that anything old is necessarily bad. That your otherwise calm and reasoned presentation allowed this pejorative to slip in belies the psychological bias that underlies the wide arguments on the subject.

      Lest we forget, Linux as a whole turned 25 recently. That's antique. Are you giving up the entirety because it's old? Your favorite editor is probably (just based on popularity) is either emacs or vi / vim. They are very, very old (heck, I've been using emacs since the early 1980s!). Are you dumping them because they are old? I hope you see why calling something "antique" is ill-conceived.

      Now to make sure that my point is being made clear, allow me to be explicit: old does not necessarily mean bad, but it does not necessarily mean good, either. Things that are old now were once shiny and new, and weren't necessarily an improvement when they were introduced. But change merely for the sake of change -- which seems to be what was behind debacles in KDE, Gnome, systemd, and Wayland to name a handful -- is wasted effort. For systemd in particular, the primary argument for using it seems to be parallel init, something that as many others have pointed out really isn't much of an issue these days since (a) Linux is generally stable enough that reboots are rare (although there are specific use-cases that benefit, like demand-based VM creation), and (b) computers have become generally fast enough that reboots are inherently speedy.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    12. Re:Init alternatives by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > To that end, the only real interaction you normally have with systemd is to start or stop a service, and view the associated logs if some service is misbehaving.

      Systemd has also taken over network configuration with an unnecessary DHCP service, which it should _not_ have touched, automounting, and is now attempting to manage user processes with misfeatures that kill user processes silently, such as the default enabled "KillUserProcess" command. Please be clear that systemd is not attempting to _manage_ processes. It is attempting to directly manage almost _all_ system services, many of them by direct replacement with dangerously incompatible and modified systems.

    13. Re:Init alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In the spirit of "Do one thing and do it well", systemd's goal ...

      BWAHAHA!

      You just don't understand the one thing that systemd is aspiring to do: replace.

  2. lol! "entanglement" is right! by tlambert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    lol! "entanglement" is right!

    What did Einstein call quantum entanglement?

    "Spooky action at a distance".

    What better way to talk about systemd...