Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Devuan’s Goal and Audience

  • Presented as “Debian without systemd,” aiming to restore “init freedom” by defaulting to sysvinit while supporting alternatives (OpenRC, runit, dinit, etc.).
  • Seen as valuable for:
    • Very resource‑constrained systems.
    • Environments where admins want consistency between *BSD and Linux.
    • Containers or specialized setups that don’t want a full systemd stack.
  • Some argue its main “feature list” is simply “no systemd”; others say that’s exactly the needed niche and keeps non‑systemd futures viable.

Critiques of systemd

  • Philosophical:
    • Violates a traditional Unix “small tools” approach by bundling many subsystems (logging, DNS, userdb, etc.) around PID 1.
    • Encourages a monoculture: once adopted, more packages depend on systemd‑specific interfaces, raising the cost of avoiding it.
    • Perceived as hostile to portability (e.g., BSDs, alternate libcs) and to modular replacements.
  • Technical / operational:
    • Binary journal format disliked vs plain text logs; complaints about size, corruption on crashes, and speed.
    • Debugging seen as opaque: unclear “stop jobs,” need for daemon-reload loops, background actions like remounting filesystems.
    • Systemd’s tight control of cgroups and auto‑mount behavior can surprise admins used to traditional semantics.
  • Political / future‑risk:
    • Some see Red Hat/IBM influence and compare systemd’s spread to “embrace, extend, extinguish.”
    • Strong fears (others call them speculative) that coupling with remote attestation could lead to locked‑down, attested‑only Linux systems, analogized to phones, consoles, and proprietary hardware.

Defenses and Praise of systemd

  • Many report it as “rock solid” and a major improvement over fragile, script‑based init systems:
    • Better handling of dependencies, parallel boot, proper service supervision, restart, socket activation, automount, cgroup‑based cleanup.
    • Unit files are seen as simpler and less error‑prone than thousands of bespoke shell scripts with races, PID‑file bugs, and ad‑hoc sleeps.
  • Some argue binary logging plus tools like journalctl solve real problems (rotation, centralized querying), especially when combined with traditional syslog.
  • View that maintainers reasonably converged on systemd because it reduces distro‑specific glue and gives a unified target for bug reports.

Alternatives and Mixed Feelings

  • Alternatives mentioned: OpenRC, runit, s6, daemontools, dinit; some users happily run non‑systemd distros (Devuan, Alpine, Void, etc.).
  • Several commenters “hate the brand” but concede systemd‑as‑PID1 is technically the best they’ve used.
  • General agreement that having Devuan and similar projects is healthy to preserve real choice, even among systemd users.