Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On 2024-12-07, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

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I've heard about devuan and antix, but how come none of those guys went to
slckware to escape their systemd problems?

I might not be one of "those guys", but this is my journey as a
refugee from systemd:

- Based on notes and potentially fallible memory from 2013, I had
  been on Mageia 2.  IIRC, it was the next version of Mageia that
  switched to systemd.  I use RAIDs for main storage.  My test VM
  installed fine, but when I tried to boot the test VM via
  systemd, it hung for several minutes and then booted into a
  very broken state.  Some stuff (including filesystems) had
  timed out and not booted, while other stuff (including
  filesystems) had not.  The tools to decipher systemd's binary
  journal (rather than plain-text logs) were not installed by
  default.  The system was in "I've fallen and can't get up"
  condition.  At that point, I decided I would be one of the last
  people on the planet to be using something other than systemd
  on my main machine(s).

- I ran Debian 7 from late 2013 to mid-2018.  It was great, but
  then Debian was overcome by the systemd virus, so my journey
  continued.

- I ran Slackware 14.2 from mid-2018 to late 2018.  Updates to
  the kernel were a royal pain, because the tools to generate an
  initrd with drivers for RAID are not even in IKEA-like state.
  I got tired of having to troubleshoot the manual initrd
  generation process on every kernel update.  Every time,
  something else had gone wrong and needed to be figured out and
  solved.  Fatigue set in.

- In late 2018, I switched to Devuan ascii, then went to beowulf,
  then chimaera, and now daedalus.

Along the way, I think I tried a couple of other non-systemd
distributions.  IIRC, one of them was too much like a toy, and
another set up hardware in such a way that disks kept detaching
and spamming system logs with messages about a disk going offline
and being recovered, rinsing, and repeating endlessly.

If Devuan continues to be viable, I'll probably stay here for as
long as possible.  If/when Devuan becomes non-viable, I'll try to
find a viable Linux distribution with a variant of BSD as
fallback.

How's that for a long answer to a short question?  :-)

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)