[Discuss] About to rip out systemd and start over

[Mike Small]

Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> writes:

> On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 01:50:26PM -0700, Rich Braun wrote:
>> The bottom line is it looks like I need to carve out a weekend, or a week, to
>> swap out the distro on which my home-server systems are built. Should I
>> embrace or toss out systemd when I choose this new platform?
> 3. Choose an unfamiliar distro with a sane init system.
>
> 4. Go to a non-Linux UNIX. Probably difficult for non-server
> machines. You might have luck with FreeBSD, or maybe one of the 
> OpenSolaris derivatives.
>
>
> If you think that some familiar distro will consider moving away
> from systemd in the next major release, option 2 could be quite
> attractive. 
>
> 3 and 4 are bigger risks. Any other people depend on these systems
> besides you? If it's just you, good backups and doing one system
> at a time might be the way to go.
>

Running any of the BSDs isn't particularly difficult or risky. BSDNow
has been referencing a number of blogs from Linux users switching
lately. I don't find the topic interesting so I haven't read them, but
the feedback as summarised by the hosts has generally been positive
from the people who've switched. It's really not that different an
experience using a BSD instead of a GNU/Linux system. You can even run
Gnome or KDE if you're into that sort of thing.

Hardware support isn't as broad as is Linux's, however. I've found I
prefer OpenBSD of all the free Unix clones I've tried. Yet it has
trouble with the sound card on the laptop I'm typing this on. So for
this machine I use Slackware, which would fall under #3.

Slackware's quite pleasant, predictable, and configuration is intuitive
-- look at the scripts under /etc/rc.d and it's more or less clear
what's going on. In a lot of ways it's less fuss to use than other
distros. I find after I do an install I do very little adminning and
fussing around with the package tools. Partly this is because for some
reason I never feel the urge to follow Slackware current while on Debian
sooner or later I always wanted to pop up to testing or unstable. What
comes with Slackware is pretty current as of the time of its release.
So at least for me it never feels lacking in what it offers as is.  

Just read the "Slackware way" section of their website (or the
philosophy section of their wiki) at some point so you don't try to
fight with their approach based on what you're used to.  For instance,
when you first install, just install everything, don't fuss around
picking packages. That's their path of least resistance. What I do is to
uninstall things I don't use as they get security updates, well at least
the things that plainly don't have reverse dependencies. "Everything"
isn't monstrous. The number 7 GB comes to mind but maybe it's more up to
10 or 11 now (or maybe it was 7 vanilla, 11 with KDE?).

If you need Gnome or something not packaged in the main distro look
around a bit. Things that Patrick doesn't take on or has dropped
generally are picked up by Alien Bob or other members of the community
and distributed from slackbuilds.org. Or you can make, make install
yourself. It's one of PV's design goals not to get in your way if you
choose that way or choose to deviate from his choices under /etc/.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at panix.com