Because they can.
But there’s no sense crying after every mistake.
You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake.
- OpenRC just feels nice
- Runit is simple
- S6 is really fucking fast
- Some distros (e.g. Guix, Void, Gentoo) come with non-systemd init systems by default, but I use them for other reasons
As for why I sometimes use musl, I like BSD. Also, Alpine Linux uses it by default, and most glibc software I’ve tried works just fine with gcompat.
I had to debug dns issues with a wm. Was disgusted what Systemd all does what it shouldn’t.
Musl was fine until i had to install the one blob most people hate and love, Steam.
Systemd is nice, but it touches way too much IMO. Like, why does it need to touch DNS?
systemd-resolved is an independent binary and entirely optional, just developed by the same project.
That said, it’s good. Supported DoT and DNSSEC early, easy to configure. No complaints for simple usage.
And it does proper split DNS by default, using the search domains of each interface. That way you can configure a global DNS resolver while still being able to resolve local hostnames and without leaking other queries. I just hope they’ll also add DoH support, which is less likely to be blocked on a corporate network.
and entirely optional
In.the sense that it is usually delivered with all the other optional modules, and for alternatives or the old default you would need a bunch of shims and wrappers.
I use distros with systemd but damn, pretty soon it’s not gnu/linux anymore, it’ll be systemd/linux. systemd already manages services, bootloader, dns and networking. Maybe they’ll replace coreutils next and the transition is completed.
I don’t find that to be a problem. Systemd manages my system, I would not prefer having 10+ tools to do the same
Gentoo comes with OpenRC as default so I roll with it. And it’s simple and it works.
Plus the idea of having to randomly wait for some obscure stuff to block for a minute the boot/shutdown is not my thing.
You have to compile everything though, even from a stage 2 installation. I haven’t attempted one for like 15 years, but I imagine it’s still not quick.
It’s not too bad. I very rarely recompile everything from scratch and after I do that I just create a snapshot with btrfs. Are usually then chroot into that snapshot and compile everything natively overnight for that 5% Theoretical performance boost.
Most recently I took that snapshot and then used btrfs send to adapt it to a laptop as well and that worked quite well actually.
Everything I install is typically through flatpack or distro box just like silver blue. This means install times are pretty much okay but I have a huge amount of flexibility in the way the system works
Also heaps of binary packages as well, so that’s not too bad. The binary packages much slower than both arch and Alpine but not a lot slower than for example Fedora.
