this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Ive been runing Debian 12 (kde) since bookworm was released and am loving it.

I have recently discovered Devuan which seems to be Debian without systemd - what is the benefit of removing this init system?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For a desktop user I don't see any significant benefits to replace systemd. But also no-systemd distros works fine. I was impressed during my try on Alpine Linux, that uses openrc instead. The text printing during OS startup is so short that the terminal didn't scroll. The bluetooth worked flawlessly. But it is a small community distro, and Alpine is limited by other things than the init system. The init system is a problem for people that have to deal with services.

On political aspects, IMO FOSS works easier with small and focused components that can survive with spare time developers. I can't make critisicms on technical aspect, I'm not a good programmer, I just notice systemd seems to works fine. Red hat has man-power and capable of large contributions to Linux distros so they leads the innovations. All big distros switched to systemd, now its hard to avoid.

I would like to support smaller FOSS-friendly systems but I use Arch because I need recent versions and the anti-systemd arch-forks are harder to use. I'm a weak guy.

In short, as an user you should be fine by keeping normal Debian. If for political reasons you want a no systemd distro, the easiest is to use MX Linux with the default init.