Hypothetically speaking, let us take Arch, and rebuild nearly all of it, without systemd. What does this mean?
On any particular core, extra, community package, the minimal environment needed to build a package, incorporates systemd and its libs. It is part of Arch base. So systemd is present even when it is not required. Some packages from source incorporate utilities based on systemd/libs and will utilize those in their package when present. Sometimes it is evident, sometimes not so obvious. So the hypothetical task is to build everything (except systemd and parts themselves) in a systemd-free environment. See when errors arise due to the lack of it, disable systemd/logind utilities where we can, and see what arch would be like without systemd.
Let us say we did all this, and we were successful, it is all arch as normal WITHOUT SYSTEMD. Now we can select sinit, sysvinit, runit, s6, 66, openRc, … etc. They ALL work with this system. Well, they worked before as well, but the system was full of trash, referencing an octapus of a system that didn’t exist, since we removed it “violently” but in a sloppy way. It is sloppy to use an entire distro built at the presence of a library that you now removed. Removing any /usr/lib/systemd, /usr/bin/systemd, /etc/systemd/, doesn’t change the fact that software still think they are there.
Take a break, digest what has been hypothesized up to now, and let us answer the next question.
Enough thought?
Ok, since we are weird and impossible to tolerate as partners in crime, with this hypothetical Arch remake now, we choose ……………………………….. to install systemd!
BOEING ….DOING…. a fuse is about to burst in pieces. We did all this, hypothetically, to have systemd as init and service management?
Will it work?
Should it work?
Why wouldn’t it work?
O/I (either works or doesn’t, what do you speculate?)
It most likely works, except for some systemd based utilities of certain software that was turned off at buildtime, but systemd and services work, logind, journald, alll running fine. You thought it wouldn’t work unless the entire distro is built on its presence? No the system will boot with systemd as Pid1, and services will be brought up, managed and logged by systemd. There should be no conceivable reason why you can’t externally add systemd to any system except if its entirety was built in its presence.
Why wouldn’t it work? Please answer it for us if our imagination can’t reach that far.
So it works when we build everything at its absence? And this is the way it should work, mrs.Archers. When it is a direct dependency and you want to build with systemd, you add it as a dependency, it doesn’t need to be a base bystander. Is this unreasonable?
Why bust our cojones about your “clean chroot” and building process when you yourselves are dirtying it up.?? Clean and systemd trash in the same sentence is evidence of a sick mind! And elogind IS systemd, it is the most pervasive and invasive piece of software, not the init and service running itself. Elogind is the branch of systemd that does the most damage! So don’t give me that mέrda about elogind is not systemd.
Now! Since we asked ourselves the right question, when was the presence of sysvinit, runit, openrc, essential in building all packages? Never, they take very little in terms of dependency to build themselves, and they are pretty isolated doing the work they were designed to do (init + service running/supervising/managing) irrelevant to the rest of the system. When you remove sysvinit, or runit, or s6, or openrc, of sinit, or perp, from a system, there is nothing that indicates they were ever there. You remove systemd as a package, and it is everywhere still!
So, systemd is much more than meets the eye! It is much more invasive and can be when you allow it.
Now take the dreaded Void as an example, they say they add the elogind/libs dependency ONLY when it is absolutely necessary to provide specific software functionality, it is not present in the building process of EVERY package. What does artix do? Who cares, they just don’t want to do extra work, they just copy All of Arch, and substitute Pid1 with a different init, provide 3 choices, but Linus forbid you take elogind away from the Artix base. The easy way out. 4 years ago Manjaro-OpenRC worked the same way. Slackware? Don’t even ask, they add a direct dependency on elogind even when it is absolutely unnecessary. I wouldn’t be surprised if they build nano with elogind, who knows!
Read what Arch’s principles and foundamentals were. Minimal, with least alteration from upstream as necessary to fit all in with the rest of the pkgs. So such an Arch as we hypothetically propose would be much more like Arch than today’s Arch is. Void does this without a commitment against systemd, and were using systemd before Arch, or Debian I think.
You want a clear, clean, true Arch? Build it yourself!
-Udevd
Now repeat everything said here, but add udevd to the equation, things get really harder and much more evasive maneuvers would be necessary to achieve a really clean result. In some cases you have to substitute udevd, like with smdev, mdevd, nldev, libudev-zero, and no eudev is no real substitution, it is the same thing as udevd without its systemd plugs. This by the way has to be done in stages or rebuilds, because you need a live system without udev mounts, to build one with a substitute cleanly. So the first run is a system utilizing udevd, building based on alternatives, then boot on the alternative and try building everything over again. It sound easy.
So where are we in the struggle against IBM domination? Ground zero, we are just starting to realize the task involved in achieving something of substance.. While we are contemplating how to attack the monster more and more upstream is getting comfortable taking it for granded, that if it is linux as the end user, systemd, libs, logind, udevd, are all there, so don’t bother writing something more generic and unix like in nature. It is in ALL LINUX … now and it will be more and more later.
Can we live without desktops and their “for the handicapped utilities”, as Poettering would label his end-users?
As long as morons see a necessity for automounting, auto change of user rights, auto configuring daemons, auto network, …. and this is a “FREE” system, there will be tremendous value in projects like Sabotage, carbs, kiss, mere, etc. As long as there are people claiming to be experienced users who can’t live without plymouth, splash screens, and display-managers, because they have an alergy to console screens, waste GB or ram for some gui configuring their networking needs, … things will remain at ground zero.
When you get serious about your distro we will seriously consider talking about it.
systemd-free linux community 
What is impossible ? Nothing ! Only will is required , and from this post I see a new distro in it’s inception , hope it’s a chirtsmas gift 🧧 🙂
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Ηет! Don’t try to drag us all down your metaphysical psycho mumble jumble here!
NOT EVERYTHING is possible, just because it can be conceived, we are not idealists here, we are good old dialectical materialists.
Somethings are impossible in the material world. In the world of ghosts, spirits, imagination, nothing is impossible. An elephant can swim at the speed of sound 10Km under the surface of the ocean, without breathing aparatus, and a sea-turtle can fly to the stratosphere if she gets a good headstart.
Apart from will it takes effort, action, energy and time. It takes sufficient resources and food reserves.
The only thing that is unnecessary is some God’s blessings and spiritual enlightenment.
Whether the question constitutes a proposal for something possibly possible … that is another story.
Who knows, maybe someone will take us up to the challenge and prove us right or wrong, you never know until you have it physically in front of you to test.
Now why does a Stalinist нет comes out to a non-Russian speaker when it comes to materialism, that my analyst will have to explain. Someday I may have to visit one.
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Agreed upon ! I was just high on my drugs thinking about how human mind can do things e.g copying human mind digitally to a chip .
My issue is I pick up some selective words out of a whole text and build a whole story upon that e.g englighment made me think of when will systemdfree write an article about 2bwm installation and configuration on Arch Linux ?
I like all the articles on systemdfree and read them immediately when I get a popup alert about a new article.
Happy writing and have a merry Christmas there at Chicago city , hope it’s snowing there already 🙂
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It is nice and warm here in Chicago, except for when the wind comes from the frozen lake.
Since you know much more than us about 2bwm, why not write a review or a comparison with Openbox, and it will get published here.
I have been playing with twm/vtwm lately, I am not yet comfortable or found answers about problems I am having with its configuration.
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Shockingly, after all these years artix now supports seatd as an alternative to elogind. I’ve been using it and it works well assuming no attachements to display managers or polkit. People outside of the ones running the distro have gotten unofficial support for udev alternatives, but it’s incredibly janky. I’ve tried following the instructions in the link below, but I’ve never gotten it to work properly. dbus, as far as I can tell, is still not optional.
capezotte
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1 I took the liberty to convert the text link into an html link since you complained it looked ugly, which we don’t care much here. So don’t be worried in the future.
2 The link is about udevd replacement which you make little mention here and I believe it is a bit out of context. That gist mentions “an article” about replacing udevd with alternatives, and although he makes no reference to which specific article, I believe the article is “here”.
3 Providing seatd as an alternative to elogind is foolish, providing seatd along with systemd/elogind, just like Arch and Artix do, is equally foolish, as the one doesn’t replace the other. Providing seatd along with consolekit as an alternative to systemd/elogind makes more sense, as seatd just does things consolekit doesn’t do, but it does the same as elogind and systemd do together with many other things.
4 Are you sure you are running a Display Manager with seatd and no elogind? Which display manager is this? Amd what desktop environment or window manager are you using?
5 Is dbus “not optional”? Depends, fist of all to whether your distro makes it optional or not while building 1000packages with it as a dependence. But even when packages are built with dbus dependency, it is a package management dependency, meaning that it has to be installed as well. Being installed and being able to run are completely different things. You may install chess, but chess doesn’t run while LibreOffice does. Have you tried stopping dbus from running with your service manager (openRc, runit, 66?). What happens?
I haven’t used dbus (have it run) for ages, so it must be optional!
I don’t know whether Artix rebuilds chromium without systemd, but try (% sudo pacman -Sdd chromium) it installs without its dependency. Now run it without elogind, without dbus even, and please report EXACTLY what dysfunctionality you dealt with. Ok, I’ll give you an easy one, if you use cupsd for printing, it won’t work! Other than printing, what can chromium do that it needs elogind+dbus? I am not being sarcastic, I really like to know.
The main question is why are you using seatd? Are you using a wayland compositor like wlroots? If you are running just Xorg and some desktop, chances are you don’t need either seatd or elogind. This is just Artix shoving it in where it doesn’t belong.
Don’t tell me you are running KDE-plasma, and don’t tell me you have kuserfeedback installed as well, and Artix is in full support of telemetry and the KDE gang spying on your system 24/7 because Artix provided them the door to do so!
Morphine is just as bad as heroin, depending of how sanitary the conditions of administering it. Artix is just as much a pusher as Arch is, the drug is very similar. Kicking a morphine addiction can be just as painful too. Methodone is running closely behind.
But if you want to pretend you are no longer an addict, you no longer depend on IBM spyware, you can’t do it without a degree of discomfort. You want squishy icons, and finger free disk mounting formatting printing, etc, just by moving a pointing device with you chin, you have to endure some pain, like typing
% sudo e2fsck -c -v -p /dev/sdb22.It would take months to really make artix run without udevd. Why? Because 1/4 of their [system] packages are built on a udevd environment and dependency. You can’t expect software that is built with udevd mapping to operate with an alternative without issues. Booting and being able to use the terminal and the browser is not the same as a system “built” without udevd. It appears as the person who wrote that gist hasn’t gotten a good grip on what it all means and he is going out publishing guides on how to do it.
Now, don’t take this personal, just that you come here talking about artix is like scratching your back on the shepperd’s stick! Artix sells itself now as “independent from Arch”, and we all know I am not an Arch fanboy, right? Artix simply copies 95% of PKGBUILDs from Arch and leaves them unaltered, very few do they substitute systemd with elogind. Then they build software and shove it out to users as “binaries”. To make their life even easier, they even adopted the suspicious compressor zstd that Arch adopted and abandoned the superior and trustworthy xz.
Take glibc and gcc, copy their PKGBUILDs from Artix or Arch, no difference, check the sums, they are identical. Now build them in a base Artix environment. What? Do they fail within a few seconds? How can that be? Where do they get their built package that they place in the [system] repository?
Speculation: (the only logical explanation for a package that doesn’t build no matter what)… you take the Arch binary, tarball, expand it, change the buildinfo environment list and replace arch with artix packages, sign the tarball with your own key, compress it, and shove it out to the repository as your own!
Hey, is this independence or is it cheating? How many devs are involved in this conspiracy? ONE!
Hierarchy and authority leads to corruption, deceit, abuse, and exploitation. If you apply as a dev/packager you go through a live interview to become part of the “gang”. Are they the only ones in the linux community? No!!! They are just an example since you mentioned them.
Kiss linux (and many forks) doesn’t have Xorg, only wayland compositors and window managers. They don’t have elogind, or consolekit, or dbus, or any such crap, and their compositor works fine, no complaints for the past 6 months. Kiss linux doesn’t provide any binaries, an initial tarball to get you to build your own system. There is a quality and morality deference here.
Sorry if you are the bearer of bad news and I am unloading on you using your comment as an excuse, but if things are not as they say they are, please let us know here. I love to learn to be wrong, it is how I learn things. Usually those guilty of being offended stay silent, those who unjustifiably were criticized scream for the correction of the record.
Don’t expect to see Artoo here any time soon!
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https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/2021/08/30/349/#comment-10300
I placed your link on the appropriate subject/article which the author neglected to link.
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Alright, I didn’t expect such a long and involved response, but you’ve given me a lot to think about.
I’ve half a mind to try and see if my system works properly with no seatd/elogind at all now, and turning off dbus to see if there’s a difference (I don’t use cupsd).
The display manager problem was narrowed down to their pam_rundir package. They use a version patched by themselves, so that might be why it breaks.
The rest goes a bit over my head. My intention was to give you an update on the state of some things on artix, seeing that I do use it and from reading what you wrote in this article I got the impression that you didn’t know about the seatd and janky udevd alternatives that it has now. Didn’t think it would be irrelevant since you did mention elogind, udevd and artix in your post, but yeah, the udevd article is more appropriate to post that link.
tl;dr not trying to scratch my back on the shepperd’s stick, just wanted to give you an update on something you might’ve otherwise not known about.
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PS: I don’t think the capezotte text was talking about the udevd is dead article with “This article’s recommended substitute is nldev + smdev(…)”. I think it just meant “This article” as in itself.
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There is this guy who had made all those packages for AUR, which he mentions in the article. Smdev/nldev etc. You substitute nldev in mkinitcpio and configure nldev to run smdev once at boot time. Then libudev-zero installed satisfies all dependencies for X11 and software at user level, which in the past it was impossible without libudev/libeudev (eudev being the same as IBM/RH udevd without the systemd functionality). It does work, but problems with identifying hardware may arise as nearly everything that has a eudev/libeudev make dependency on artix/arch/obarun is built with udevd/eudev installed.
Building all software from 0 with libudev-zero instead of libeudev identifies the problematic ones who need to be patched and configured differently to compile with the substitute library. This will in turn evolve into a different distro all together, not a small task.
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As a next day update, you were right, I didn’t need seatd OR elogind. Both are completely off and (forcibly) uninstalled and nothing broke.
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Are you some kind of racist? Why the hell all hate to SystemD, even being open-source (linux community’s heart)? This is like yikes, pretty much in these days you still following the UNIX philosophy, which doesn’t make any sense. “Linux” kernel itself does a lot of things, not to mention the user land, DE, dbus. And all you found SystemD. What’s your real problem with it? If you don’t like something just don’t use it, you don’t need to spread your hate to Internet as you didn’t got a life.
If you don’t want this kind of message, just don’t spread your hate. This feels ridiculous, when I literally saw the blog.
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Go learn English first then try to express your ignorance.
The aim of IBM/RH has been dominance on FOSS and dependency on their toolsystem, same practice google and others use to lure development under their control.
The FOSS philosophy is not single corporation monopoly and control, it is rather the diametrical opposite of what these corporations perpetuate.
Hence the problem with IBM trojan-horse, RedHat.
You are defending an evil multinational corporation ripping off people and local public funds for decades and calling me racist. Obviously you have no clue what the term means. Open up a social sciences dictionary.
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