What's your favourite OS that does not use systemd?

Why should I not use systemd?

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.

Void, because it works really well on my super low-resource chromebook!

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.

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.

Probably Artix, because it's like Arch, and I use Arch btw

"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

Scans room

Windows 11.

Alpine.

Have used crux but using low end / old hardware results in almost permanent building software.

An hour in and no mention of Slackware yet?

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.

Debian, installed without systemd as per the wiki. So far I've not hit any issues, whilst I've recently ended up diving through both kernel and systemd code to find the root cause of an issue I was hitting on one server. I could have just bodged past it, but I wanted to actually understand what the issue was, and what else it was going to affect.

Gentoo with OpenRC

System service managers like systemd, OpenRC, runit, or SysVinit often come down to user preference. While these systems are crucial for initializing and managing services on servers, where uptime, resource allocation, and specific daemon behaviors are important, their impact on a typical desktop or laptop is generally minimal.

For most personal devices, the primary functions of a service manager occur largely out of sight. As long as the system boots reliably and applications run smoothly, the underlying service manager rarely registers as a significant factor in the daily user experience.

For many, including myself, systemd simply works without much fuss. My choice to stick with it isn't due to strong conviction or deep technical analysis, but rather the simple fact that I've rarely, if ever, had to interact with it directly. For my personal desktop and laptop, it reliably handles booting, service management, and shutdown in the background. If it's not broken and isn't hindering my daily computing, there's no compelling reason to explore alternatives.

I suppose that would be Android, since that's the only non systemd OS I use.

I don't care about the init system, however i do love void mainly because of the package manager.

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).

What's wrong with systemd?

systemd is great

Normie here, what's wrong with systemd?

Artix with openrc

Void Linux, although I use NixOS nowadays.

GNU cat

You mean GNU cat?

It's either Slackware (Linux, no systemd), OpenBSD or NetBSD.

True story: I install a Red Hat server with a disk shelf with about 12 SAS disk in it. Red Hat has systemd. Everything works fine for a month.

One (1) disk out of the 12 fails. No biggie. Shutdown the server cleanly. Replace disk. Flip power back on. Rebuild disk config. Simple, right?

Wrong. You see, systemd is unhappy. It detects a new disk. It has lost a previous disk. And so, it refuses to boot. Period.

Yes, there are ways out of this. But that was the day I decided systemd was the down of the devil.

I like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Alpine, and Devuan.

Nintendo 3DS

what is that little pixel cat at the top? It also appears on https://katia.ripe.net/ is it referencing something?

Debian that i haven't updated in 10 years

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".

PalmOS. So simplistic yet powerful. I miss those old PDAs :(

Alpine Linux would be my favourite, although I only use it as a server distro. I use Artix as my daily driver for personal computers because of the AUR and glibc (Alpine is musl). I also enjoy Void but it's not got as much software as Artix repos + AUR.

postmarketOS, though they are in the process of migrating to systemd. Not that I personally mind terribly much, even if it feels like a bit of an odd choice. So maybe I should say Alpine.

In terms of Linux, either Devuan sysvinit, Void, or Alpine.

I am also a fan of BSD.

GNU Guix System, using GNU Shepherd as init. It does its job quite well.

OpenWRT

macOS. I find it to be the least inconvenient for most of my needs.

FreeBSD! It's so simple, and so reliable

I have to write startup scripts time-to-time and I have to say that I don’t miss at all the old init-system.

Not that systemd don’t have flaws, but in old init-system even simplest daemon took too many lines. Not to mention hacky comment definitions.

Artix is an under-appreciated gem.

Guix

MX Linux of course

I use Gentoo. I install systemd willingly. We are not the same.

Lot's of Systemd apologists, barely one answer to the question.

There are few system manager (single project or a mix of components) that use linux features efficiently and none have dev resource remotely comparable to systemd. That's why in practice systemd is the best system layer implementation on gnu/linux. Android and chromeos userland (upstart derived) are not exactly (freedesktop) gnu/linux.

EDIT: the post ask which OS though. Including userland I like android a lot, but I would say illumos distros (OI currently). illumos has a system management similar to systemd (contracts in place of cgroups for example). Actually systemd was heavily inspired by SMF too.

Alpine. No GNU and systemD.

Totally Guix, it has no systemd and is able to roll back to the last working in case you break anything somehow

OS/2

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.

Alpine

Open or Free BSD.

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.

Artix has the most amount of alternative init systems available.

I would recommend Devuan, but it just wraps SysV in runit as a service manager rather than just using runit as init.

Gentoo has options for systemd or openrc. You can get runit or s6 to work on it if you're pretty familiar with how /sbin/init works,or so I've ascertained from researching, but have not done this yet.

Void is very interesting as it uses runit and also uses musl instead of glibc. I don't think it has quite as many packages as Artix though due to lack of AUR, and I can only estimate that the use of musl instead of glibc necessitates the need for some interesting workarounds from time to time.

I use Artix with runit. Have been daily driving this for around 6 years now and have been very happy with it.

If I were to use anything else I'd go through the trouble of installing Gentoo and configure it to use s6 init. Just to get more granular control.

cat propaganda

MacOS. I use Linux for servers, Mac for daily driver. Windows for zilch, only at my job because I have to.

Slackware linux

Alpine. It’s very lightweight.

🤔Windows 🤣

GrapheneOS, I assume

FreeBSD.

And you can run Linux stuff just fine.

GrapheneOS for Google Pixels, LineageOS for any other phone.

What's SystemD and what is it bad?

In terms of desktop operating systems, my first choices are usually Chimera Linux or FreeBSD.

Offtopic, but... Another ANeko user :D

OS400 (IBM i)

cat head but no tail

I misread and wondered when did systemd release cat as in the software not the animal.

Haiku is pretty neat

OPNSense.

Now that Windows qualifies under the prompt, not that I'd pick it but it's just funny that it is.

Well, for me personally this would be EmuTOS

I typically don't use things without systemd

If anything OpenWRT

Probably PalmOS.

Kolibri, which only needs a handful of RAM and disk space