systemd cat and GNU cat hugging a Linux cat.
What's SystemD and what is it bad?
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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In terms of desktop operating systems, my first choices are usually Chimera Linux or FreeBSD.
MacOS.
But my actually favourite OS does use systemd.
Open or Free BSD.
Well, for me personally this would be EmuTOS
GrapheneOS for Google Pixels, LineageOS for any other phone.
I use Gentoo. I install systemd willingly. We are not the same.
Never had an issue with systemd and I've tinkered with it quite a bit, so I think I'll just stick with an OS that uses it.
I personally think AROS ( AROS Research Operating Syste ) is pretty cool. Same with just the basic Amiga Workbench 3 series ( the only one I have any experience with ).
Obviously Amiga Workbench isn't daily driver ready, but neither is AROS since it's, from what I can tell, just an Amiga OS passion project trying to make a more modern more open source Amiga OS.
My favorite is Debian, with systemd uninstalled. At this point, you can't install Debian without systemd, but you can uninstall systemd after OS installation.
It used to be that most desktop environments in Debian depended on libpam-systemd, which depended on systemd and systemd-sysv. More recently, desktop environments just depend on libpam-elogind and elogind which is only part of systemd, and allows you to use sysvinit.
I prefer sysvinit mainly because I find it easier to create custom services out of my own programs. My success rate at doing this in systemd is 1/3, and in sysvinit about 10/10.
I also had a problem where a Debian-based embedded system had some kind of broken NTP client running on startup, and due to systemd, I couldn't figure out how to disable it. It would set the time to several years into the future, as soon as it first got a network connection on each startup.
Devuan is doing the Lords work
Sorry if it wasn't obvious, I'm using sysvinit.
It was obvious, don't worry.
I just thought of the joke, and thought it was funny.
After having a lot of sysvinit experience, the transition to setting up my own systemd services has been brutal. What finally clicked for me was that I had this habit of building mini-services based on shellscripts; and systemd goes out of its way to deliberately break those: it wants a single stable process to monitor; and if it sniffs out that you are doing some sketchy things that forks in ways it disapproves of, it is going to shut the whole thing down.
FreeBSD.
And you can run Linux stuff just fine.
Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn't need Linux for work reasons.
This feels like an "I would switch to Linux if I didn't need Windows for work" comment from another universe.
OpenWRT
"systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time" -Churchill, if he had been a nerd
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