Devuan is a dutch Linux distro free of systemd (www.devuan.org)

submitted 1 week ago by Sunshine@piefed.ca to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk

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[-] infinite_looper@piefed.social 17 points 1 week ago

I use it and it does the job, but the problem is that it doesn't adhere to Unix philosophy of pluggable components that do one thing. In fact, the systemd suite does dozens of things:

init system
manages services
login
user sessions
system logs
devices
networking
DNS resolution
timers
clock synchronization
containers
even boot loader

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

In fact, the systemd suite does dozens of things

...poorly.

[-] auzy1@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

People keep mentioning this. It's not actually a problem

It's not even a good philosophy anymore (although, not actually even sure where this statement originated). The Linux kernel does more than 1 thing. So does Gnome, KDE, etc.

The old init scripts did "one thing", but, because they did too little, the scripts were difficult to write, there were issues like race conditions, etc.

Anyone who ever wrote a SysV script would tell you what an absolute nightmare they were.. Whereas, SystemD, even more complex ones which depend on a lot of factors are now easy (and only a few lines).

[-] infinite_looper@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

systemd init scripts are more ergonomic than sysvinit scripts. I agree.

Does systemd work? Yes. Can I live with it? Yes. I've embraced it since it became a de facto standard.

The thing I somewhat dislike is that you cannot easily replace individual systemd components. The systemd-logind and systemd-journald for example have to be compiled from the exact same systemd version (e.g. both v234). There are way more gotchas like that if you try to replace them for non-systemd alternatives.

If you're solely interested in having a working OS then it's all good. If you like to tinker and learn, and want to fully embrace Unix modularity mindset then systemd made your life a little more difficult in that aspect.

Also I'm glad that distributions like Void Linux, Guix or Devuan from this post title exist that try another approach. I hope one day I'll have enough time to daily drive them!

[-] Reznik@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Your browser doesn't follow the unix philosophy: Downloading a site is 1 job, rendering another one. Do change that to?

this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026

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