The rest here:

https://hackaday.com/2018/01/30/maki...kware-in-2018/

Interesting - and why can it not 'avoid' systemd - or why cannot any distro avoid systemd? Is it just an inevitability waiting to happen? A 'when' rather than an 'if'?

Cool webpage. Thanks for the link.

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The controversial potential threat level of systemd, or more to the point it's adoption and dependencies is as yet unknown since it is still eveolving. Initially it usurped udev and the hard dependency made it nearly unavoidable until the Gentoo community created eudev. Any future hard dependencies could recreate this condition and it can't be known if there is or will ever be one that SysVInit cannot avoid with an alternate. The odds are that at least such an alternate should be possible but whether or not someone(s) will invest in creating it can't be known until it happens. Obviously one could just continue to use an older non-systemd distro and just update kernels, security patches, and some software but just how long that would be viable depends on what software comes to have a hard dependency on systemd in the future. As long as Open Source files are available this shouldn't become completely unavoidable for a few years yet, but the possibility at some point does still remain that it could become just too much work or limitation to avoid.

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From the comments:

And I thought I was the only one.

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Nope. Been there, done that, but passed on buying the t-shirt!

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You have no idea how much happier I am after switching to Slackware from Debian. GRUB almost never worked for me, I would have to reboot about 5 times to get the GRUB loader screen sometimes. What a nightmare. I was a Debian user from '99 until about 5 years ago.

Here's a couple of screenshots that I took after switching and tried to load Debian on the exact same laptop that I used Debian for years on. These are from a fresh clean install, I think that this was version 8.0:

https://i.imgur.com/A7uOJcB.png
https://i.imgur.com/6CD2acb.png

Agree. I also thought it was a nice article. The comments were interesting and quite a few were amusing.

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Quite a few comments were annoying as well.

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Love that.......I started my Linux journey using Slack, but found the Debian way worked better for me, & quickly changed over.

I had been running a Debian based system for many years, but when they adopted systemd, (which I regard as a MS type of bug), I went & made sure I had a back up system in hand, & for me it is OpenBSD.

I still have a sort of affection towards Slack though, as it was my first encounter with Linux.

Hi,

I started with Slackware 2.0 in 1994, and ran Slackware as my main Linux distro until around 1997 or 1998 or so. After that I went to Red Hat 5.x, and stuck with Red Hat in its various forms until 2012 when I switched to Ubuntu 12.04. I moved back to Slackware at the end of last year, as I was finding with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS I was just having too many weird problems on boot that seemed to be related to the init system just not doing things in a dependable or reliable order.

Sometimes after boot one of my monitors would work, but not the other. Sometimes my NIC wouldn't come up. Other times a CIFS or NFS filesystem would fail to mount. It was just lots of little random and unpredictable things like this that finally pushed me back to Slackware. I'm sure I could have put the time into sorting out things on a "modern" init system so that it actually did what I wanted when I wanted in a reliable fashion, but I figured: why waste my time taming it when I could just go back to a distro running plain old-fashioned BSD init that would give me the same results every time ?

Since going back to Slackware I've had none of these random "will it work or won't it" boot problems. All my hardware, software, network connections and network filesystems work every time, on every boot, without fail or intervention required on my part. It Just Works, as they say. Certainly it works well enough for me, and at the end of the day that's the main point I think - running something you feel comfortable and happy with. And for me, my work distro of choice is now Slackware once again.

Interestingly at home I decided to give other things a try, and ended up running Tribblix, an Illumos distro. I was a Solaris guy back in the day, but after the rise of Linux I pretty much stopped using it for most things. It's been fun to go back to using SunOS as well. Tribblix is very Slackware-like (or classic Solaris 2.x-like, which is much the same thing), with everything configured at the command line pretty much. I did try OpenIndiana (the "default" Illumos distro, more or less), but it just wasn't quite to my taste, though it was perfectly fine as far as it went.

So that's where I'm at these days: Slackware and Tribblix. It's been good to have things just be simpler and easier and 100% dependable again, which has been less and less the case with desktop Linux in the last few years.

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Great article. I would correct two or three things but it is a good explanation of why someone would consider Slackware these days.

Especially this part:

The fact is that Slackware sometimes does apply patches; most obviously to fix bugs, but also sometimes to change annoying features in upstream software. But such patching is VERY, VERY rare.

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Yeah, "death by a thousand little cuts." Welcome to LQ!

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