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systemd cat and GNU cat hugging a Linux cat.
Windows 11, but only for personal reasons. Mainly because it is the only OS that has proper HDR support. The moment Linux catches up (that includes either Nvidia or a 3rd party implementing RTX HDR support as well), I will stop dial dual-booting and go all in on Arch.
Alpine. No GNU and systemD.
What's SystemD and what is it bad?
This:
IDK why it's bad, though. My only complaint is that it can take a long time to boot depending on your system, but I don't think a SystemD issue.
Open or Free BSD.
Well, for me personally this would be EmuTOS
GrapheneOS for Google Pixels, LineageOS for any other phone.
I use Gentoo. I install systemd willingly. We are not the same.
FreeBSD.
And you can run Linux stuff just fine.
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.
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".
I had a look at Haiku some months ago. Its single user architecture is an interesting choice. I mean, you don't need to worry about privilege escalation exploits, if you are always fully privileged /s
Yeah, it doesn't actually make much of a difference:
Fundamentally the idea of having a separate admin account, which is completely protected, and a user account where everything can mingle together and see everything else, is a 1960s security model. It was originally created for a world where the owner of the computer and the user of the computer were two different people. In that world the user provides all the software that they want to run in their account (they probably wrote it) and the OS's job is to protect the admin account from users and the users from each other.
Fast forward to the present day and this security model is completely mismatched with the reality of a personal computer. The internet exists, the user and owner are the same person, and they're probably not writing all their software themselves. A piece of malicious or compromised software can encrypt every file in your user folder, steal your browser history, your saved passwords, and (on xwindows) record your keystrokes and make your screen display anything it wants, all without privilege escalation. But you can rest assured knowing that the user account can't violate any timeshare limits that the root account placed on it.
The one thing you could argue is that a separate admin account makes it easier to detect and fix a compromised user account, but:
Most people are not in the habit of regularly logging into their root account and examining all the processes that are running in their user account. In fact many distributions do not even have a separate root account.
If you do think your computer has been compromised the sensible thing is to wipe the disk and restore from backup. It just doesn't make any sense to fiddle around trying to figure out just how compromised you are and trying to reverse the process in a running system.
If you're running xwindows I hope you never install updates or type your password for any other reason while some malicious software is running, since, as previously stated, anything running under your account can record your keystrokes. In that case your admin account is compromised anyway without having to use any privilege escalation exploits. Can you see how all this stuff was built with the assumption that the user and owner are two separate people with two separate passwords?
With Wayland and containerized applications we are slowly moving away from that 1960s security posture, which is something that's long overdo. But currently something like Linux Mint is not really much better off than Haiku, from a pure security model standpoint.
In any case its security model is not the interesting thing about Haiku.
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.
I've used Alpine for desktop, it's honestly pretty good, small footprint and has most major desktops and their goodies. If you're desperate for something out of the norm you still have flatpak.
I'm sure it is good for a lot of use-cases, but I want to be able to e.g. play video games without issue. Which is far easier on a glibc system.
Normie here, what's wrong with systemd?
Some people think it handles too many low-level systems. It's a valid concern because if systemd itself were to become compromised (like Xz Utils was) or a serious bug was introduced, all of the userland processes would be affected. People who are stuck in the 90s and think that the Unix philosophy is still relevant will also point out that it's a needlessly complex software suite and we should all go back to writing initscripts in bash.
Red Hat, the owner of systemd, has also had its fair share of controversies. It's a company that many distrust.
Ultimately, those whose opinion mattered the most decided that systemd's benefits outweigh the risks and drawbacks. Debian held a vote to determine the project's future regarding init systems. Arch Linux replaced initscripts because systemd was simply better, and replicating and maintaining its features (like starting services once their dependencies are running) with initscripts would've been unjustifiably complicated.
I agree with you, but please let's stop acting like there are only two init systems.
I hate it when people argue that systemd is better than init.d. So is everything else, I'm more than happy with OpenRC, and love it more than systemd.
There really is just one init system. Everyone and there dog uses systemd. It is the old people who hate change that are complaining.
I changed to OpenRC and I've never been happier.
Gentoo rules.
OpenRC has all the issues of systemd and none of the benefits
I can't say I understand your view point
What issues do you mean? And what benefits?
Nothing, it's just bloated but in practice if your system meets normal distros system requirements systemd isn't going to make that much of a difference in practical use.
Bloated when being run on a potato.
Luckily 99.9% of people do not compute on a potato.
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.
Tribalism exists in every circle, perhaps moreso in tech circles. Ironically anyone who hates on a distro could just switch, or build their own distro if they were so inclined, but it's often the hating that people participate more in than using their system. Use what works for you, and if it no longer works for you use something else.
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 once hit my head on a metal pipe
From then forward I stopped using indoor plumbing
This has never happened to me on a systemd server before. Methinks you left out some details
Probably systemd panicked because disk id has changed. Not a reason to stop booting but that is why people hate it. Tries to handle everything, badly.
Why should I not use systemd?
If you have to ask, then there's no reason not to. It's people who tinker with their systems that encounter issues with it, or more often random annoyances that add up over tme to those memes.
When you're not using your computer
because the over 70 different binaries of systemd are "not modular" because they are designed to work together. What makes a monolith is, apparently, the name of the overarching project, not it being a single binary (which again, it's not)
If I cared about modularity I'd use something like Hurd, but i actually need to get shit done
When you want to feel special but not enough to go to the effort of using FreeBSD
I already am special enough, my mom said so
Contrarianism
Perfectly legitimate reason to do/ not do anything
/s
Probably Artix, because it's like Arch, and I use Arch btw
There is an openrc package in aur, so perhaps arch can use non-systemd init as well.
Would probably be a hell to actually implement, as everything is made for systemd (as in, all packages rely on systemd for being run)