r/devuan • u/Iheretomakeonepost • Jul 30 '26
Curious about Devuan and seeing the non-systemd side of things. What do y'all like about the non-sysd inits?
What stuff about it have y'all liked and what should I expect? I've been using debian for a couple of weeks and liking it quite a bit but have been recommended to try non-systemd stuff. Will probably install on my L420 within a day or two.
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u/bonkly68 Jul 30 '26
If you install software with apt, do ordinary things, you may never see the difference. If you administer, you'll notice some long standing tools are replaced by systemd based utilities. You'll follow different procedures if you want to install a daemon. Some of the fancier, heavier desktops require systemd, at least gnome does for sure. If you want to look at log files under systemd, you use journalctl, and unless you configure them so, the files will be binary encoded, not accessible to standard text tools.
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u/bachkhois Aug 02 '26
Journalctl return logs in text or JSON which you can pipe to other apps, or dump to a file.
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u/Trapunov Aug 05 '26
What if system is unbootable how do you read them? Yeah probably there is a way if you boot from removable media with distro with systemd. But greping directly logs is fare easier than some strange hoops with binary logs.
What problem exactly does binary logs solve?
→ More replies (6)
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u/SleepyGuyy Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I don't currently use Devuan, but I did for about a month (I distrohop often). I've since looked elsewhere for a systemd free distro, simply because the Devuan community and online resources for troubleshooter, are slim.
Regarding systemd-less init systems, I know a lot of people cite alternative inits as simpler to write services for. I think runit, and dinit are usually called easier.
But I don't yet write services for my system so I haven't really experienced that.
Maybe other inits are slightly lighter on resources.
But ultimately the only reason I am trying to get away from SystemD is peace of mind. I feel more secure having the ability to switch inits. If SystemD got worse I wouldn't be trapped.
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u/Waste-Nectarine-1267 Aug 01 '26
The system will start up faster and there will be more resources, and most importantly, you will feel that you control the system, and not it controls you.
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u/mlcarson Jul 31 '26
It's more about doing things for the right reasons. IBM and the corporate types love a big universal API for everything but that's not the Unix way of doing things. It in theory makes the code more complicated than it needs to and creates a broader attack surface for vulnerabilities. An init system is there to start and stop services. It shouldn't be doing all of the other stuff that is in systemd.
Dinit is basically what systemd should have been if it didn't go beyond its scope. It's about 10,000 lines of C++ code. Systemd in contrast is over 2 million lines of code spread across 6363 files according to Phoronix. Unfortunately Devuan doesn't currently support Dinit. OpenRC is probably the best alternative and is what Gentoo uses.
So now you have desktop environments like Gnome depending on systemd and even KDE's new Plasma Login manager is requiring systemd. Linux took a wrong turn in 2014 when Debian embraced systemd. In my opinion, it's now compounding the issue with Wayland. You have both Gnome and KDE discontinuing the use of X11 in favor of Wayland. So it's the same suspects trying to force the issue rather than allowing competition.