[Discuss] About to rip out systemd and start over

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 01:50:26PM -0700, Rich Braun wrote:
> The bottom line is it looks like I need to carve out a weekend, or a week, to
> swap out the distro on which my home-server systems are built. Should I
> embrace or toss out systemd when I choose this new platform?

Sigh.

Options:

1. Choose a familiar distro and accept that systemd insanity
will continue until at least the next major release.

2. Choose a familiar distro and rip out systemd, replacing it
with something that works. (sysvinit works. runit will probably
work. Close relatives of runit, including daemontools, will
probably work. OpenRC has some problems but nothing unsolvable
if you aren't ideologically committed to purity.) Know that
upgrades and new package installs will probably pose issues, but
minor ones since "write an init script" is well within anyone's
capabilities.

3. Choose an unfamiliar distro with a sane init system.

4. Go to a non-Linux UNIX. Probably difficult for non-server
machines. You might have luck with FreeBSD, or maybe one of the 
OpenSolaris derivatives.


If you think that some familiar distro will consider moving away
from systemd in the next major release, option 2 could be quite
attractive. 

3 and 4 are bigger risks. Any other people depend on these systems
besides you? If it's just you, good backups and doing one system
at a time might be the way to go.

-dsr-