[Discuss] systemd Alternatives

[Steve Litt]

Kent Borg said on Sun, 18 Jan 2026 06:59:59 -0800

>On 1/17/26 9:11 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
>> Void Linux has X11 and MATE,  
>
>I don't think I had heard of Void Linux. I'll keep it in mind. Poking 
>about I'm pleased that MATE seems a common in distributions, good. And 
>this gets me wondering about systemd alternatives.

If you're wondering about systemd alternatives, I'm one of many
authorities on that subject. You can read a journal of my my 2014-2015
search for an alternative on my "Manjaro Experiments" subsite at
https://troubleshooters.com/linux/init/manjaro_experiments.htm . And to
talk to the ultimate init system authorities, join the Supervision
mailing list at supervision at list.skarnet.org . Those guys know
EVERYTHING.

There are several great systemd alternatives. Here are the main ones:

* Runit
* s6
* OpenRC
* Epoch
* GNU Shepherd
* Busybox init
* Simple Init from Suckless tools (plus a supervisor of your choice)
* Nitro

And, in my opinion, sysvinit, which is a piece of junk, is better than
systemd. And you can use sysvinit's PID1 plus a supervisor of your
choice (runit, s6, daemontools, etc.) to make a very fine init system.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com