A year has passed and systemd is still around

There couldn’t be a better birthday gift to sysdfree.wordpress.com than an active community participation as in the dbus exorcism thread that has an active discussion on the project.   https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/232

A year has gone by and the “service daemon” systemd is still prevalent in the number of linux distributions; we can’t speculate on the number of users.  So we are not as effective and as “organized” as a community to defeat it yet.  Therefore we must try harder.  We should take a step back though and assess the status and development of the community consciously striving to stay away from systemd, its derivatives, and its relatives.

2017 was an anti-systemd decisive and exciting year.  Devuan became stable and was released in the form of Devuan 1.0 Jesse and early 2018 saw the second edition, Ascii.  Manjaro turned systemd only, and terminated its OpenRC effort, which together with Arch-OpenRC formed Artix.

Artix since then has been developing and moving like a freight train.  The freight is the enormous amount of packages in the Arch repositories that are “cleaned” and built by Artix to complete its own set of repositories.  So the freight is mounting and users reliance on Arch is becoming smaller and smaller, and in general this is on packages that don’t have systemd related dependencies.  Artix keeps developing its own tools as well, added a second init system (runit) to its initial OpenRC offering, and the installer has the option to install Artix with OpenRC or Runit from the first step.  Although switching from one to another is rather easy.  Ready made live isos with desktops have fallen slightly behind in the work schedule and we suspect a surprise in the next batch.  Currently there is a minimal runit iso that can install a base system like the arch installer and the user will have to manually built on that minimal system.

Obarun is still progressing on its own merit of being Arch with S6 as the init system.  The approach is similar to AntiX in hardcore intolerance to systemd and libsystemd.  We tend to rely on Obarun on day to day work and we find it absolutely bulletproof and its forum community is also ranked #1.  Obarun’s tools past the init system family of software, are becoming addictive and we seem to be trying to copy them for use in other distributions.

Void:  Early in 2018 the void team of developers announced that the founder of the project had gone AWOL, vanished, for months, which caused a certain amount of nervousness in the community.  Void not only overcame the obstacles of the sudden disappearance, it seems as it came out on the other side of this river crossing better organized and prepared for a prosperous future.  Void, for those that don’t realize this, is not ONE distribution, but two separate distributions with many similarities.  The difference is the one using the glibc library the other using musl.  Despite of the warnings that the musl system is not yet complete, we have yet to find one package that works on void-glibc that doesn’t work on void-musl.  Except for trying to install palemoon which is built on glibc and is not a void package.  To be honest we didn’t try to compile it as we seem to have lost trust and faith to palemoon’s efforts due to its boycotting NoScript.  And void-musl is even faster and as reliable as void-glibc.  The greatest thing about void is that it is independent.  All packages are built by void for void, there is no Arch or Debian to blame for booby-traps sent downsteam.  So, Void is one of the promising ways to live systemd-free.

Alpine being also independent and made for minimalist server work was our most pleasant surprise.  Alpine is solely based on musl, it is small, very very small, and very very fast.  Alpine will make a recycled pc from the bin into an efficient home or small office server, router, firewall.  We even tried a couple of desktops on Alpine and except from minute details of some packages it worked flawlessly.

Antix has received minimal attention, it works, we had some issues temporarily with sid and switched to testing, but it is the best alternative to Debian without systemd.  One thing we noticed in the past 2-3 months, in the ever important statistics reported by Distrowatch, and in terms of interest in distributions, is that Mx-linux has been climbing steadily and dethroned Debian, which was also dethroned by Manjaro in the past year.  Now Mx linux is not using systemd as an init but we have not covered it.  We have tried it and it looks like a very promising system.  BUT, systemd and libsystemd is in Mx linux.  It is a different approach, much different than that of Antix-linux, in satisfying all the lazy desktop developers who use systemd gadgets unnecessarily (in most cases) by providing the whole thing without “it” being the init system.  We tend to believe this perpetuates the problem and assists in the systemd domination.  This as an approach is almost in the opposite extreme of Mx’s sister project, AntiX, which strives to block anything related to systemd from its core system.

Last but not least the anti-dbus group working on an installation that is trully dbus-free.  We wish they can make a live iso out of the project so we can all try it.

Another source of grief, unrelated to systemd, is that NSA and Google convinced Linus Trovalds to include the NSA bred Speck encryption algorithm in the 4.17 and above kernel.  Void, Antix, and Artix have produced 4.17 and 4.18 kernels with this encryption turned off.  Others, like Arch, chose to leave it active in the kernel.  Obarun, being short on manpower to be producing its own kernels, offered a procedure so you can compile your own kernel without Speck.  To us this shows that despite of it being an unrelated issue to systemd and init systems, the activist level of consciousness seem to be high and lively.  We congratulate those who choose resistance rather than compliance to the rich and powerful.  This is what it really matters and this is what it is all about!

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So where do we go from here?  We are open to suggestions.  This recent interest in extracting dbus and all related crap from a functional desktop is where we imagined this project to go.  To become a meeting point for hacking activists who despise the domination of systemd family of software (freedesktop, gnome, pulseaudio, etc.) and develop methods and processes to get rid of it all.  A community of subcommunities where people meet, exchange, share, collaborate.  We have failed to cover and review everything and anything without systemd.  We made some choices early on and we seem to be betting on promising work-horses to ride out of the mess linux has become.  We wish others who are experienced in using and hacking gentoo, slackware, puppy, and everything else without systemd to offer their experience and share it here.  We are open and encourage such contribution.

Happy anniversary to all of us here, and please think of this meeting place as our place.  We are not giving up, we are not slowing down, we are trying to catch up with all the development that is going on on those 5-6-7 distributions we have been covering.  We had some sour grapes with Devuan and that is OK, you can talk about Devuan here, it is not prohibited in any way, it is just that “we” are not going to.