FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian

59 points by nogajun

by ChocolateGod

2 subcomments

This makes the mistake of confusing systemd the service manager and systemd the project. This is an easy mistake to make given they have the same name.
The systemd service manager does not have an installer, systemd-sysinstall is a separate tool that's part of the systemd project.
> systemd already integrated it, why (age verification)
systemd has not integrated age verification. All that's been discussed is a simple field to allow a user to register a DoB and an way for services to validate the user is over a certain age.
You could arguably already do this by having a DoB field for the user, but that'd involve giving applications your full DoB which I'm sure is distasteful for many.
> usual "fight" against non-sense laws
Because developers have to follow laws like everyone else?

by mid-kid

3 subcomments

Tbh, the installer was inevitable after systemd integrated a bootloader, crafted a paritioning scheme for autodiscovery, took over user and home directory management, and topped it off with an updater and "system extensions" layering system that some immutable distros are using.
I'm not saying any of this is particularly bad but it's been very clear fot a while that systemd just wants to be an OS. With immutable systems the "distribution" part of it is reduced to a build system, and everything else can be provided by systemd and flatpak.

by hks0

4 subcomments

I have a curious question. My local setup has worked for me for ages ever since arch decided to switch to systemd. Same on the servers I deal with, after Debian's switch. At the same time, I can say I'm not involved with inner workings of a Linux system enough, to be affected by init system change and the pain it might bring.
In other means consider me an average Joe of the Linux world.
Hence this question: If it sucks so much, why did it become so widespread?

by INTPenis

2 subcomments

Systemd resistance is silly to me. Systemd is what is turning Linux into a viable modern OS. You need something to tie all the parts of the OS together with a unified API, otherwise you'll be fighting fragmentation constantly.
I don't like the age verification thing either, but all systemd did was add a field for it, it's still up to your distro to use it.

by atmanactive

2 subcomments

I'm confused... isn't Devuan exactly this?

by Someone

0 subcomment

FTA: “Before deleting systemd, need to be sure that OpenRC will be installed, to so the command will be
sudo apt purge --allow-remove-essential systemd && sudo apt install openrc sysvinit-core
”
I don’t see that installing openrc before deleting systemd. It tries to delete systemd and, if that fully succeeds, to install openrc.
> Issue itself was that while uninstalling systemd somehow OpenRC was removed too or not installed at all.
I don’t see how “somehow OpenRC was removed” could be true if it wasn’t installed before. My hunch would be that uninstalling systemd failed halfway through.

by jdw64

2 subcomments

I mainly use Ubuntu, so I know about systemd, but what is OpenRC? Why is there such a split, and why are people arguing about it in the comments? Could someone kindly explain it to me?
I only know how to control Linux through systemctl, and I don't know much beyond that. It seems like the components are different, but I'd appreciate it if someone could explain it to me.

by unsungNovelty

0 subcomment

Alpine Linux and Void are the only mainstream enough distro I can think of as an interest for my planB.
But I wonder how good Alpine is for desktop computing and development stuff. I know they have recently started shipping full DEs for desktop IIRC.
Anyone with any experiences?

by eqvinox

0 subcomment

For people interested in "less systemd" there's also the gardenhouse bits at https://git.pinkro.se/

by 0dayz

5 subcomments

To this day I have not found a single modern argument against systemd that is a technical one (I tried systemd but it does not support x which openrc does), instead it's these vague bike shed arguments (Unix philosophy, anti-centralization and "bloat" ).
I can't wrap my head around it, since those 3 are a "you" problem, systemd is just a service manager it's you who decide to use other systemd parts.

by lousken

2 subcomments

Just install devuan?

by jmclnx

0 subcomment

> Currently OpenRC does the work.
That is a shame, but I wonder if you tried this with devuan you may have better luck ?
https://www.devuan.org/

by HackerThemAll

2 subcomments

Not long in the future we'll have "Systemd Linux".

by ErroneousBosh

1 subcomments

Interesting that it's kind of that simple. It looks almost like you could make a fairly straightforward fork that works with that, as long as they sysvinit packages are kept up-to-date.
I have to say while I dislike systemd it hasn't annoyed me enough to send me down that route yet.

by globular-toast

6 subcomments

I find it fascinating how different people are with respect to being able to see the future, or at least caring about it. I find many people are like lumbering beasts in a forest complaining when a twig pokes them in the eye. While other saw the forest from miles away and just went around it.
Gentoo is still home to a sizeable number of users who noped out of systemd more than 10 years ago. This is exactly the kind of thing they saw on the horizon. Why does it take others so long to see the same thing?

by pydry

6 subcomments

systemd desperately needs competition. it isnt just that it became a dependency for every low level service and a potential vector for privacy invasion, it's also janky to use.

by mkesper

3 subcomments

You do not have to use all resources that are under the systemd umbrella. That's just BS, sorry. And prod deployments breaking... Well I guess that never happened with those best-managed sysv init scripts? Guys, pick your fights reasonably.

by shevy-java

2 subcomments

The article makes one key mistake, in that it compares systemd to openrc. Aka some monster-system with billion features, to a fairly small system that juts relates to initializing a few things.
The whole debate about systemd has always been very dishonest from the systemd devs. If you have 3 million lines of code, for instance, and offer 5000 features, just to give out semi-random numbers, then every alternative with, say, 100.000 lines of code and only 50 features, will lose out by definition. Systemd has NEVER been solely or primarily been an "init" system. People need to stop buying the propaganda 1:1. That includes self-promo.
It is the same with age sniffing; some still believe it is about protecting kids. Then they were flabbergasted when governments - who suspiciously smell like corporate-controlled governments by the way, in particular in the UK - declare total war against VPNs. The excuse they use is not convincing at all, IF you buy into the assumption that this is about kids (which it is not).
On the other hand, when systemd decided to support age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), I guess they went a step too far. People who weren't against systemd, look at it differently now. After all why is Poettering so defensive about systemd supporting age sniffing? All that tasty data that is to be amassed. Some private entities love that data. You have become the product.
As for "alternatives" to systemd, which is a misnomer IMO: I found that all the alternatives are pretty bad too. The best option is to try to stay as lean as possible without losing things that are objectively useful. Any init system that depends on shell scripts, already is a failure by design. (Systemd's unit files are also a failure; and the lack of transparency too. It is like the ultimate trojan horse.)

by valentynkit

1 subcomments

Curious how you're handling supervision after the switch. The remoteproc unit you converted by hand is the part that gets interesting: when it crashes, what restarts it, and what guarantees it came up only after its dependencies were actually ready rather than just launched? That dependency ordering and the cgroup resource accounting are the real work, and OpenRC hands both back to you.

by taris2

0 subcomment

[flagged]