We are a systemd free linux community

Edited again: 2018-11-15

As the previous site started out (08/2017) of the temporary need for Artix users to meet and exchange experiences, share solutions to problems, now that Artix has its official site, we have decided to move in the direction the site had already taken anyway.  Freedom and equality of access and exchange of information.

Antix is to Debian what Obarun is to Arch, and Devuan is to debian what Artix is to arch.  Such projects/distributions seem to be very promising in concept and execution.  Equally promising, if not more, is Void and Adélie linux taking an independent path.  Unfortunately we can not cover the progress of too many distros and at times we may have to drop a few from the list and concentrate on the few we believe there is future and hope.  We have dropped Devuan over a year ago due to serious doubts with the project’s management, and now we have decided Artix has to go too.

Openbox tweaks and tricks – no {dbus,ck2,elogind,dm} no user services needed

Although this was created with Obarun/Arch based distros in mind it works pretty universally for nearly all distro that have openbox available (nearly all except for Adelie that is).  About building and installing obmenu-generator there is an older article here.

Originally published in the Obarun Forum, so here is a copy:

Openbox tweaks and tricks – no dbus – no ck2 – no user services

Minimalist tricks and treats

To start you need xorg-xinit and openbox installed:

From AUR download, build, and install obmenu-generator

You can use pacopts or cower if you don’t have something else as an AUR helper, ask for help if you want details, especially if you want to install yaourt, the best AUR helper ever created which was taken off AUR for a second time in less than a year.  I wish they would make their minds up!

Popular mythology spread by IBM parrots elogind vs consolekit2 1.2.2

Thanks to the great work by Eric Koegel and Antoine Jacoutot we were not wrong again!

Parrots never think of what it is they say, they hear things (generally things are heard through highly paid and supported media that serve corporate and state interests) and reproduce the sound of them.  Not that they are dumb, but they can’t process rational language based communication. 

QUESTION: Why are you dumping consolekit2 and use elogind, that you know is just a significant piece of systemd, which further makes upstream reliance to systemd more acceptable and wide spread?

EXCUSE:  Consolekit is deprecated, it is unmaintained, it will never work with Wayland, and we must support wayland because that is the future.

QUESTION: Could consolekit2 be able to work with wayland?

EXCUSE: No, it never will!

QUESTION: Elogind, being a piece of the most convoluted piece of opensource software ever encountered is very big.  Shouldn’t this be a performance concern?

EXCUSE: No, because consolekit was also huge!

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ANSWER:  Consolekit2 1.2.2 was released Dec.20 2020 and among its changes is a memory leak fix, NetBSD/OpenBSD fixes/compliance and more.  If you notice in the list of issues and discussion there has been a workaround to get ck2 to work with wayland in Gentoo since 2018. 

Consolekit2 is between a 1/5 to 1/6 of the size of elogind!

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Zenwalk Slackel Salix – Slackware without systemd?

Run, don’t just add it on the TDO list, and download images from those two (Salix is dormant and part of Slackel) and if you do an installation, DO NOT do a network install, do copy from live image, or from CD.  We will explain later, while you are downloading those historic pieces of Slackware forks.

Cut them some slack?  New Years day and all happy hunky dory crap….  Not here folks, go to Phoronix or Fedora-Magazine for such festive atmosphere.

Slackel and Zenwalk (2021), report by Oneirosopher

A Short MEMO on Slackies to serve for all purposes…

Slackel has been designed so that:

• it comes for 64-bit and 32-bit CPUs as well;
• be %100 compatible with Slackware (Current) –beware: as such, it comes with elogind;
• it may be capable of using Salix’s source packages;
• it provides an OpenBox flavour (OB is not in the Slackware repos);
• the KDE-desktop is KDE 4;- MATE is more recent: 1.22;
• it comes with house-built Slackel tools: slapt-get & slapt-src to CLI-manage packages, Gslapt as a GUI frontend for the both of them;
• it provides, quote: “a ‘rolling release’ for lazy slackers” (Dimitris’ words);
• its ISOs both enable to install the system and to run (fast) live-sessions;
• it enables to create a liveUSB with persistance features directly from within a live-session;
• since last version, it be possible to perform a real installation on a USB media, which differs from liveUSB with persistance (it doesn’t get slow when more packages are installed).

2021 hardcore list of linux without elogind and other systemd tracking devices

        Edited: Dec 30th 2020

This list is going to be short and there may be a sublist of distros with a medium strict standard.  We shall explain what the object is, below the short list (which we hope the community will assist in making longer as we have not been able to currently review the work of every distro and fork.

2021 list of “healthy” hardcore distros in alphabetical order

1.    Kiss Linux –> k1ss.org
2.    Kwort Linux –> kwort.org
3.    Obarun Linux –> obarun.org
4.    Sabotage Linux  –> sabotage-linux

Hardcore because they seem honest and dedicated to the war against totalitarianism by IBM and other mega corporations to dominate the Open and Free software world.

mr Edward Snowden, facebook and open/free code directed to linux users

This is going to be short, it is me not providing information but asking for it from the community.

Snowden has come out and spoken loudly on facebook, google, and other social media, of being up to no good against people using their free services.  I can’t find any reference on how exactly those mega corporations deal and cooperate with state agencies, or even whether state agencies relate to the foundation of such corporations.  If, and whether, some were founded specifically for the purpose of what they are accused of doing, by Snowden and many others who are less well known.

Why was Nutyx dropped from our lists

NO PUBLICITY IS BAD PUBLICITY

In our initial review of Nutyx, more than a year ago, we did not see a distro struggling for identity, we applauded their effort to make a linux system work without components of the pest (systemd, pulseaudio, gnome, wayland, etc.) but independently using the “stable” consolekit2, sysvinit as tried and refined for decades, and their very own tool for package management, cards.  Revisiting it now, after comments on our list of linux distributions without systemd, we were both disappointed and curious on why and how they did such a thing.  We have seen others go, but they were more like forks of a system than an independent distribution.  Like ArchBang, the fleadog of flea dogs.

Sabotage Linux on the “progress” of Linux

Since we agree with every word and punctuation in this article, we proudly republish it from the Sabotage Linux website:

When “progress” is backwards

Lately I see many developments in the linux FOSS world that sell themselves as progress, but are actually hugely annoying and counter-productive.

Counter-productive to a point where they actually cause major regressions, costs, and as in the case of GTK+3 ruin user experience and the possibility that we’ll ever enjoy “The year of the Linux desktop”.

Releax OS review

by Jordan (sysdfree community member)

Finally I managed to setup a Releax OS usable installation, thanks to the support of the dev, a very nice and helpful guy.

First look: very beautiful, colorful xfce desktop, the system is based on openRC as init, elogind and glibc. Just another distro? Maybe, but at least it has its own package installer with a front-end (a software center called Bazaar) and an unusual specific path where apps are installed (the “apps” folder, something like Gobo Linux). However, this distro still needs lot of polishing.

r/linux removes Obarun announcement

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/…./modular_boot_process_a_new_door_to_the_future
In case the above link magically vanishes from reddit here is a screenshot of what it looked like (a couple more comments may have been added) and below see the text and imagine the reasons this announcement was removed by the moderators of r/linux.  Imagine also what the “image” of linux is perpetrated to be.  I say they are going for one linux, IBM’s linux, systemd linux, with various flavors of desktop crap just like themes of MS-windows or Apple’s and Google’s squishy flaky bubble hovering CRAP!

No systemd, no elogind, no consolekit, no dbus – what did I miss?

Many reviews of linux distros you may read tell you what you need  to have (systemd – elogind – consolekit, – dbus : SECD from now on) to use the distro.  It is rarely seen or heard whether you can have an effective graphical interface, a desktop, a window manager, and not use any of the above.  Sometimes for a rarely used or never used utility you need one of those monsters, but hardly ever anyone goes out of his way to tell you “this is the ONLY instance you need this, otherwise you can do without”.  So the question on this topic should be obvious, “what can I do and have installed, or even if it is installed have it running, without the use of the SECD?”.  The less obvious question to the one questioning is “why?”.  Does anyone still ask why anymore, or have we (linux users) generally turned to fashion monkeys?

Ataraxia and the need for a stricter list of distros

A while ago someone I didn’t know contacted me in reddit about the list of distributions without systemd, suggesting I should add ataraxia linux.  Ataraxia Linux was very similar to kiss-linux, source based, musl, but featuring an array of init and service supervision systems available to choose.  A few weeks ago, someone (turns out to be the same person) added a comment to this blog to this more precise list of “linux distributions without systemd” and suggested I should add Ataraxia to the list, and I did.

Then a comment comes in by someone who is really going through the list of distributions and also has been reviewing the narrow list of distributions, or systems, built on musl instead of glibc.  He alerted me to the fact that Ataraxia is now using systemd as its default init system.  It didn’t strike me as odd in the beginning, even though I had recently given it a try.  I was under the impression, never tried, that systemd couldn’t be built on musl as it wasn’t even written in C.  So I asked that same guy, who turns out to be the distro owner of ataraxia, how has he  achieved this, and I got a single word response:  “patching”.