systemd lost the plot a long time ago. they stopped following the Unix philosophy and now they're busy adding nonsense like age verification. Just like Firefox, systemd doesn't understand its core user base. There are plenty of distros without systemd
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

It really has been taking a very wrong direction for quite some time. Lots of bloat and unnecessary components, poor standards, etc etc.

Apparently OpenRC is a really good alternative, but it comes at the catch that a lot of stuff is built to call systemd a dependency and will claim it can't work without it. *Sigh* Hopefully all this will result in a general switch away from that hot mess and proper support from everything for, well, anything else...

in reply to Nazo

blegh! this type of dependency on something that should be totally independent is a sign of structural failure, i suppose..

i've been a debian fanby for the longest time but maybe it's time to look into other distros. can anyone recommend me which are the most "mainstream"/well-maintained non-systemd distros?

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

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in reply to bazkie πŸ‘©πŸΌβ€πŸ’» bitplanes 🎡

@bazkie

blegh! this type of dependency on something that should be totally independent is a sign of structural failure, i suppose..


Exactly this.

Systemd has completely lost sight of its entire purpose. It should be simple, minimal, and just get the job done. It sure shouldn't become... this...

(And I too am a Debian person. I kind of don't really want to switch right now though.)

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in reply to Nazo

in reply to nieuemma

Most of it does seem to be just about making a point and I can't read all of it, but I do see a few lines that are supposed to actually modify the user's birth date to 1970-01-01 or blank depending on which mode one uses. (Assuming that /etc/userdb/username is correct anyway.) And for some reason it can set a script that says it does it again once a day every day. I'm not too sure it's a good idea to mess with the release name and such necessarily though. I think this one is just about making the point more than anything and should only be used by people who don't mind their system (pretty much completely literally) saying "I'm breaking a law on purpose" specifically to make a point.
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in reply to nieuemma

@nieuemma @snosrapkungfu @bazkie From what little I can tell it doesn't change a lot. It sets the userdb birthdate and keeps changing it and it sets the ID to its name as you said. It also throws in an arbitrary script that just simply says something to the effect of "error, unable to determine age" or whatever in a folder of its own that nothing would ever call. πŸ˜†

Basically every single part of it is more just for show than anything else. The one and only thing it does seriously I'm pretty sure people can manually do if this script can do it β€” without the potential breakage of the system identifying itself differently.

They also plan to do a "flatpak store for children" with stuff like an app that prints the text "peepee" really big. Like I said, it's all for show...

in reply to Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou

This is almost entirely the problem at my end. I also have spent many years on various distros from Mandriva, to Magiea, to Ubuntu, to Garuda.

To the best of my knowledge all of those that still exist are systemd houses.

If I want to move away from systemd, it seems I have to go with off-band distros, but I still want my KDE desktop!

@bazkie @nixCraft

in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

@bytebro @bazkie Turns out there are a few that are specifically designed to move away. I'm probably going to give Devuan a shot as soon as I can as it sounds like it's very close to pure Debian in every other way. They have a page listing several distros that are not based on systemd (or at least have an easy option to switch): devuan.org/os/init-freedom

Distrowatch themselves popped up to suggest it and a couple of others.

in reply to Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou

Installed it in a Gnome-Boxes VM and not impressed with the WE. It doesn't automagically recognise my screen size on boot, unlike Ubuntu, Mint, Cachy, Tuxedo, Garuda, etc, do. And the best resolutions available in the Settings screen are not even close to what is needed.

I think this one goes down as a 'work-in-progress' for now.

@bazkie @nixCraft

in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

That's very strange. It's mostly plain Debian in regards to things like what drivers/etc are in the stock kernel as far as I know. If plain Debian works then it should.

Works fine for me, but I have an AMD GPU which is a whole lot of Just Worksβ„’ in Linux compared to others these days. (Kind of ironic that once it was nVidia for that and now they are the ones that suck at it.)

Main thing I ran into was stuff like pipewire-pulse wouldn't work with it stock. It would need something such as that MX Linux method.

Speaking of, maybe you should look into MX Linux?

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in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

I'm messing around with it right now. As a warning, the KDE version uses systemd if I read correctly. You'd want to install the XFCE version. But you can then just install kde (and optionally install and switch to sddm. Actually, that may not be optional. Lightdm and KDE aren't getting along well for me anymore.)
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in reply to Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou

Devuan still refuses to, or is unable to, sort out a wide-screen on boot - according to my notes this should be about 3440x1440, and it doesn't seem to be able to handle that. Hey-ho, we'll look for other alternatives.

@bazkie @nixCraft

in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

@bytebro @bazkie Sounds like it's a matter of loading the appropriate driver for whatever your hardware uses? It's basically just Debian in regards to that. Framebuffer/etc stuff should work exactly the same. Exactly the same...
in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

@bytebro @bazkie Not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying it's very very weird because it's literally just "Debian without systemd." So it should literally act just like Debian in regards to things like that. It's very strange.
in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

@nazokiyoubinbou

Hah! Well that was interesting - I fired up VirtualBox for the first time in a long time, then told it to create a Devuan VM, with essentially the same config that the Gnome-Boxes one had. It crashed whilst booting the ISO, so didn't even get to a Live login! Colour me as 'less than comfortable' with it, right now.

@bazkie @nixCraft

in reply to Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou

Stable? Sure. It's a 2.5yr old Tuxedo laptop with 32GbRAM and 1Tb of SDD.

For each VM, I've given 16Gb of virtual RAM and 40GB of virtual HDD. The Gnome-Boxes one works, but has no clue about my graphics capabilities, and the VirtualBox one simply fails even to boot the ISO.

Most odd.

@bazkie @nixCraft

in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

@bytebro They pretty much say it all on their website. It's based on Debian Stable, but integrates some things from antiX Linux. It very much resembles pure Debian, but the change to sysvinit does mean some stuff is funky and it doesn't look like they've changed everything. (I'm going to have to manually rig up an old fashioned init-style service for cdemu for example I guess.)

BTW on your graphics issues, were you just talking about the framebuffer? Because a VM probably couldn't detect your monitor settings at the UEFI/init stuff. You'll probably have to manually specify a resolution if you want the framebuffer to not just default to whatever.

Normally the firmware gets it from the videocard which in turn gets the monitor itself, but a VM doesn't have direct access.

in reply to Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou

OK, as far as the graphics thing goes, I'm not sure about that - what I saw was in the System Settings, then Display, I could opt to change the screen resolution, but not a single available option actually came close to my screen. As I think I said, several other distros have just gone - 'oo that's a big screen, here you go!' or similar either at start-up or after log-in πŸ™‚

Also as I'm (almost!) about to try MX, I'll remember the Debian roots when Gnome-Boxes asks me, thanks.

@Nazo
in reply to Bytebro πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡±

@nazokiyoubinbou

OMG - this is fun!

MX (under Gnome-Boxes) has a choice in the grub menu for sysvinit or systemd, which is excellent. And it instantly picked up my screen configuration, which is even better.

I can see me playing with this over the next few day, for sure.

@Nazo
in reply to bazkie πŸ‘©πŸΌβ€πŸ’» bitplanes 🎡

@bazkie @nazokiyoubinbou Devuan is Debian with an alternative init.

Antix provides multiple init implementations.

FreeBSD is not hard if you are used to Debian.

reshared this

in reply to DistroWatch

I didn't know about this Devuan. That's kind of interesting. Perhaps that might help keep some of the compatibility I currently enjoy. I hope. I may have to give it a good look.

Thanks!

EDIT: Devuan has a page listing a number of distros with alternative inits it seems: devuan.org/os/init-freedom

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in reply to jandi

@jandi @distrowatch @bazkie I'm not sure I understand the benefit of dual init. Doesn't that mean you get the bloat and downsides of systemd while also using sysvinit for some reason? You're still going to have all the stuff that people want to avoid with systemd while it's installed and doing its thing, just with added complexity.
in reply to Nazo

The distro supports both. As you can see in the linked post you can easily remove either, but you can also pick and choose at every boot, for any purpose (troubleshooting, dev, debug, etc). MX is a decidedly pro-user distro.

In the same vein, you can use flatpaks, snaps, appimages, debs, containers, whatever, if you so choose. It's quite flexible but not (IMO) overwhelming.

Still, of course, not everything for everyone, it might not be for you.

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in reply to DistroWatch

I don't see how though. That's why I was asking of course. Just if both are installed and both are running then you get the leanness of sysv and the bloat of systemd... Which means just that much more instead of less....

In other words it's not just "best of both worlds" but literally straight up "both worlds," meaning best, worst, and a combination of the two all in one.

I just don't see how you can have 1+2 and not get 3 instead of 1.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou @jandi @bazkie Well, no. If you're running the SysV init version then systemd isn't running. But the systemd libraries are on the disk in case they are needed as dependencies. I thnk what you're missing is that both init implementations don't run at the same time so there isn't any bloat in memory or on the CPU.
in reply to DistroWatch

@distrowatch @jandi @bazkie So the combo system just has the libraries, not actually running both? They don't really say anything to that effect specifically, so that's definitely something one would have to be very clear about.

All it says on there is "dual-init" without any real specifics.

in reply to Nazo

Ok, coming back to this, I tried Devuan and immediately saw issues like simply not being able to use pipewire-pulse at all. I had assumed they would have built workarounds for stuff like that, but it kind of looks like they haven't.

So now I'm looking at MX Linux again and still trying to wrap my head fully around its setup. It seems their KDE iso is systemd only, but also their XFCE4 option includes one for newer systems with a newer kernel, so I went ahead and installed that second XFCE4 option. It at no point asked me which init to use, but it seems to have systemd installed but not running or working.

Is it safe to assume this one will be the best compatibility balance without age-gate crap or will systemd's direction still infect it?

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in reply to DistroWatch

It's definitely not showing any boot time choice on that.

Actually, I finally found it. To switch you have to go into their tweak tool. Under miscellaneous there is an option to change the init. As expected it's defaulting to "sysVinit" with the XFCE installation at least. I presume the KDE installer doesn't offer this. However, I was able to install the KDE DE in the XFCE version and it's working without me switching to systemd, so it seems kind of a strange choice.

I guess my question in regards to systemd is if stuff like that is just going to take over in such a way that simply having the libraries installed is enough for it to start collecting info. (Which is less about MX specifically and more about systemd specifically.)

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in reply to bazkie πŸ‘©πŸΌβ€πŸ’» bitplanes 🎡

I’m a huge fan of antiX. It’s non-systemd (you can install runit or SysVinit), and runs very well on older hardware (it’s based on Debian). It’s basic in appearance, and you’ll have to do some work on it to improve the experience. The antiX site also has an excellent video tutorial, as well.
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in reply to bazkie πŸ‘©πŸΌβ€πŸ’» bitplanes 🎡

@bazkie @sab38 Funny thing is, I don't think anything specifically said exactly that. πŸ˜†

It has to be license-wise though. If someone really really wanted I'm sure they could make it work (but then who would want to? Systemd really seems to be universally hated!)

in reply to bazkie πŸ‘©πŸΌβ€πŸ’» bitplanes 🎡

Indeed.

My problem with it is it has forgotten its entire purpose. Systemd is just for handling stuff like init. Why does it even have its own DNS handling and things like that? I mean that's beyond mere bloat and straight up into territory of it trying to do things it shouldn't be doing wholly unrelated to its entire purpose... (Yes, it does DNS handling now. Though a lot of distros may be turning it off by default now. A lot of people using dnsmasq/pihole/etc have found out the hard way as they tried to figure out why the port was already bound before the service could start.)

Systemd should not even be aware what users there are, much less their age. That is not within its scope.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to bazkie πŸ‘©πŸΌβ€πŸ’» bitplanes 🎡

@bazkie

"can anyone recommend me which are the most "mainstream"/well-maintained non-systemd distros?"

I have been using PCLinuxOS for nearly two years.

It is a rolling distro and is often behind the latest software releases but it is rock solid.

It uses synaptic package manager with RPMs.

in reply to nixCraft 🐧

WTF?

edit: github.com/systemd/systemd/pul…

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

I'm most worried about debut of AGENTS.md file and what says about judgment of project leaders and maintainers, and who they allow to touch codebase. millions of folks de facto need to trust every frickin commit into systemd since its on the critical path on tons of Linux hosts by now. I saw one individual in particular, working on one key subsystem who I would not trust on a system this critical, esp if that individ is also "using AI" and also gets to blame any malware-enabling commits "on some AI" rather than their own brain/hand. they could be setting us up

I'm a fan of Lennart Poettering in general but I worry he's gotten distracted by spinning up his startup Amutable

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in reply to gjerma

@gjerma
I still think politics should be done by groups like eff and fsf. The indicidual projects should just ask for direction from them. If that isnt possible, making some kind of union for foss workers or collectives could work. I still think code specialists and politucs specialists are seldom the same person which is the root of the problem imo.
@nixCraft
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

There’s little wrong with openRC, I don’t get the hate. Every system I have and there’s about 30 of them, run openrc. Except one. These are hypervisors, firewall/routers, vms and servers. I put systemd on the desktop variant only because.. and there’s really no reason for it other than curiosity. My laptop runs openrc and it’s problem free.
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

if US states mandate OS-level age assurance, how should we handle it in the Linux desktop space? Just cover our ears and pretend it’s not a problem? I’m sure Lenovo, Dell, Framework, System76, and anyone else selling computers with Linux would like to keep their California and Colorado customers.
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

systemd author Poettering decided to ridicule opposition to this earlier today. β€œLost the plot” is how I’d characterize his analogies. mastodon.social/@pid_eins/1162…


i am waiting for the moment when these folks who partake in this misguided shitstorm learn about the kind of PII the good old GECOS field on Linux/UNIX carries...

And once people are over that the next shock waits for them! There's a file in /etc/ that contains a hash (i.e. a unique identifier!) of your most personal, private, secret data: your password. And linux systems even kinda insist on you on providing that on first install! Can you believe that?


This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

it's not age verification it's just a birth date in the filesystem YOU define, no verification whatsoever. And the value is available on dbus. Up the the app developer to do something with it. Yes systemd has flaws, plural, its design is questionable. But right now it's just an excuse to bash it one more time. And so what, we go back to thousand lignes bash scripts ordered with numbers which can faim at any moment?
in reply to Florent Viel 🦫

@luxifer
Sorry, but there is no logical reason for systemd to need details that specific and precise for any purpose other than age verification.

If it were for birthday lookups for 'well wishers', it would be held in the calendar app. If it were for parental control, it would be under that heading, and only as a toggle of yes/no, on access to XYZ.

To think that it has a place in systemd at all leads to a question of why any PPI data is necessary in ANY subsystem. It's not.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

for those also asking "but nixCraft, what are these distros?" Here's a few links

nosystemd.org/#alternatives
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category…
without-systemd.org/wiki/index…

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to nixCraft 🐧

In systemd the age verification has been finally reverted

github.com/systemd/systemd/pul…

in reply to nixCraft 🐧

Here systemd evolves an existing schema in userdb to make it consistent across distros. The benefit is that if this stupid law sticks, distros can choose to comply easily. Moreover, it's a totally optional component.

Consistency and the ability to manage a system in a dynamic env with solid dependency management (versus static init.d scripts) is something systemd is brilliant at. I use Linux since 1995 and honestly, I find systemd is a big win.

⇧