systemd cat and GNU cat hugging a Linux cat.
"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
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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ReactOS.
I have no moral or philosophical objections to the design of Windows NT, just the company that makes it and the enshittification. If ReactOS ever becomes stable enough to be daily used I would use it. For now I use LinuxMint and Steam OS at home.
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GrapheneOS, I assume
Debian that i haven't updated in 10 years
Come get Devuan.
Haiku is pretty neat
What's wrong with systemd?
It tries to do everything.
Think of a thing you want to do in Linux and there is a systemd plugin for it. Itβs not the unix way
Wait until you learn about the Linux kernel and the plethora of modules and patches
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I have to say as someone who uses NixOS I love systemd, because it makes a lot of things very easy. For example hardening services ( systemd-analyze security) or replacing cron (system timer).
TIL about systemd-analyze security. Thanks!
Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they're both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).
If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that's small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.
I don't daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my "favorite".
I had a look at Haiku some months ago. Its single user architecture is an interesting choice. I mean, you don't need to worry about privilege escalation exploits, if you are always fully privileged /s
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systemd is fine. The only people I've ever heard complain about it are lonely neckbeards pretending like their opinion somehow matters.
I've used Debian as a server system since it was using init.d. And do you know what I found? systemd is easier. And the fact that Debian of all distros decided to use it says a lot.
It says that you barely can have Systemd and alternatives in the same repo without shims and patches.
That wasn't the question though.
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I have to write startup scripts time-to-time and I have to say that I donβt miss at all the old init-system.
Not that systemd donβt have flaws, but in old init-system even simplest daemon took too many lines. Not to mention hacky comment definitions.
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cat head but no tail
So the old init.d system was better? Come on people, let's stop infighting. I have zero preference on init systems. You know why? Because they're just plumbing. Stop this nonsense. Do I click on an init system? Do I use the init system to check my email? Or play games? No. I know poettering can be controversial, but let's just move on. Run freebsd if you're so butt hurt.
So the old init.d system was better?
because those are our only two options...
I hate this argument so much, because it's just a fallacy.
There are (and have been) more solid init systems.
So much more than an init system though, which I think is why people don't like it. Personally, the only annoyance I have is I preferred log files over journald.
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Totally Guix, it has no systemd and is able to roll back to the last working in case you break anything somehow
I was literally reading your guide about bonfire moments ago.
For those who don't have a problem with systemd, there is NixOS, which offers the same capabilities as guix, while having a larger community and way more available packages available in its repos.
GNU cat
You mean GNU cat?
As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd? I use Mint and I don't remember having to interact with that kind of low-level nonsense. The distro maintainers can use whatever reasoning they want to pick these details.
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