[kwlug-disc] Devuan, a distro without systemd

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On 7/29/17, Hubert Chathi <hubert at uhoreg.ca> wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Jul 2017 11:00:21 -0400, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> said:
> The fact that that one person managed to get a running Debian system with
> not-systemd was unsurprising for many Debian Developers.

OK then, you are right on that point.

Note that all this is after the fact, and efforts by some developers.
The controversial
decision to switch to systemd was taken (Feb 2014?), then much later (May 2017)
some are trying to  mitigate it.
The proper decision was to allow systemd as yet another option,
allowing pluggable
inits from the start. Even if systemd was the default it should be
fully replaceable
from the start, not 3 years after.

>> Notice when he says: "I chose LXDE for the GUI as it has no direct
>> systemd dependencies".
>
>> So, the other three desktops, Gnome, KDE and XFCE, all depend on
>> systemd. They are the more widely used, and their users are forced to
>> use systemd. , And that is where the real issue lies.
>
> Well, that's more to do with those desktops, and less to do with how
> Debian went about adopting systemd.
>
> Some Debian Developers, in fact, have done work on implementing things
> to allow those desktops to work without systemd, though I haven't tried
> it out myself, so I don't know how well it works.

The thread you linked to was from last May. Are other desktops non-systemd
capable since then?

Because if we have a minor desktop system that works with systemd, but the
major three do not, then we effectively have window dressing or demonstration
that it can be done, but practically, it can't if you want one of the
big three (like
most people).

>> And I tried checking on Ubuntu 16.04, and neither sysvinit-core nor
>> runit-systemd exist.
>
> I don't pay much attention to Ubuntu, but those packages are present in
> Debian stretch.

Ubuntu had its own init system which worked well. It suffered from the non
obvious error messages when things did not work, but one had to check in
/var/log/mysql* (or whatever package that failed to start).

When Debian said they are going systemd wholesale, Ubuntu just followed
along. They could have said, we will wait and see, or make it an option, but
instead they too decided to go all in on systemd. Another bad decision.

And remember that for desktops Ubuntu is far more commonly used than Debian.
In fact, for my clients all of them are Ubuntu, and that makes things
easier for me
since my desktop and servers run the same distro and same version.

When the most popular Debian derivative do not offer choice, and the major
desktops hinder that choice, it is no longer a choice, is it?

This is the dilemma we, the grey beards who grew up on the UNIX philosophy,
are in, and we are dismayed by the decisions. Even the vitriolic desktop wars
did not force one true version on us.