I have recently fully removed GNOME from my system bc it was starting to become a headache with all the locked customizations and its heavy dependency on systemd. I am really looking forward to clearing systemd off of my system, but it is so embedded into the building of Arch and in most of the official packages. I know Artix is a solid option, but I prefer vanilla Arch over any other Arch-based distribution. What would you guys advise me to do?
…should I just switch to Gentoo at this point?
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What is your motivation to not use systemD?
Only you will know if Gentoo resolves whatever problem you have with SystemD. Why not try it out?
If SystemD is such an integral part of Arch, it sure has a benefit in the eyes of the Arch developers.
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for reference read this or somewhere else online: Reddit - The heart of the internet
There are better and less bloated alternatives but getting them to work is such a hazard in any OS but Gentoo that supports them by default.
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Anything is controversial, especially in Linux. If you remove all controversial components, you are left without Kernel.
What exact problem do you have with SystemD? You sound like most distros shouldn’t be usable if they use systemD. There are plenty of distros using older init systems.
If Gentoo is what you need, use that and see if it holds up
Can always try Crux. Arch was originally based on this distro and just packaged. I remember Arch before it was a systemD distro. And I moved away back to Crux when they made the change.
If looking for distro’s other then systemD based ones. You may need to consider a lot more then Arch forked based distro’s.
Crux, Gentoo, Void, Slackware are my personal favorite alternative non-systemD distro’s. In that order.
Gentoo might be the easiest one of them for source based and Void for pre-packaged.
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I mean what is „vanilla“? If I need to patch a major amount of pkgs from the arch repository, is this still „vanilla“?
You will most likely end up with some sort of your own distribution.
I don’t mean you shouldn’t do that, but it will be a lot of work.
I would also recommend trying out some systemd free distributions before switching. I recently had to create a bunch of services on FreeBSD and realised how much comfort and uniformity systemd brought to the world of Linux.
What’s the reason systemd (lower case!) even exists? Following the Unix standards, it shouldn’t. Because it doesn’t follow the Unix standards 
And b/c RedHat made d@mn sure their bloatware would stifle the kernel like the monolithic design of Win-OS and have their software be essential and thus make RH hold the power of the kernel instead of having one tool for one task and be the best for it. You know the guy that “invented” systemd (and thus controls it) is now an M$ employee, right? Plus I’m quite offended by his arrogant attitude towards Linus (no, the original one 
) in his communications during development, claiming that any bug was not caused by systemd but solely user error. WTF?! 
The reasons systemd is now so widely adopted are: a) RH made damn sure any distro relying on RH source code had to implement it or face extinction and b) it wasn’t SysVinit. Lots of people had (often justified) gripes with the latter, especially during boot, as it wasn’t build for multi-core CPU’s and the parallel processing that it allowed. Had a project like OpenRC received the same funding and dev-time as systemd, it would be on par or probably better then systemd. Alas, it didn’t 
/rant over
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Devuan uses runit. How might that work out for you?
I read recently a screed saying Unix Pilosophy is Dead! Long Live … Something Else? …which I agree with up to limits: you don’t get performant RAID5/6 without the layer violation that allows dirty page writeback to also calculate parity or you don’t get secure jails/Containers without combining cgroups/netns/seccomp/id-mapping… There’s complication in everything so that our do-one-job tools have to take many steps, decomposed into functions, in order to deliver the results we desire. (Ofc, you could object to systemd in protest to the age-verification control currently being applied to our societies, I’m interested because the ‘why’ will shape what will resolve this for you.)
K3n.
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I think you should distro hop. Try Devuan, void linux, alpine and gentoo (in this order from easier to harder to manage)
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Artix if you wanna use aur and arch. Devuan is also cool
Finix is also interesting if you wanna try Nix
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Did you hear that from Lunduke or is that your own opinion? systemd is as monolithic as GNU core utils.
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I’m just a normal user who asked a reasonable question. And I get this response that sounds like you need to wear a tinfoil hat if you use SystemD.
All anyone learned from your response, is to use whatever init system W11 uses and not to care what it actually is. Because even Linux users shouldn’t care as long as it works. And if you don’t trust the distro maintainers to pick the “correct” init system, you should just create your own distro.
I won’t do it, ‘cuz me don’t do systemd, but install a basic Debian Stable system, then make a list of all utils and other tools that rely on systemd and/or its libs and cannot function without it. Then try telling me straight-faced systemd is not monolithic
I am guessing you want to remove SystemD because of the recent age verification, and I am also guessing you havent been to the Arch reddit in the past day or two?
Mods there are locking and deleting posts asking about the newest pull request into Arch for a system to begin implementing age verification capability in Arch itself. It hasnt yet been merged though, but mods are deleting peoples posts “for code of conduct violations against Arch”
It is going to be everywhere, and right now is too soon to jump ship or spend a ton of time removing one thing and switching to another since we dont yet know what will and what wont have this sort of thing put into it over the course of this year.
Things depending on systemd does not make it monolithic. By that logic curl is monolithic, less is monolithic, git is monolithic etc.
Just say that you don’t understand “your own” argument and give up my man. Also just because a distribution configures a system to heavily rely on systemd project software doesn’t mean that systemd requires you to use it all. That’s just your maintainers preference.
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Maintainers preferences is most of what makes a distro, so they do matter! Better to switch distro than fight your maintainer preferences.
Gentoo was what the cool kids used before the cool kids used Arch. It has some neat aspects to it. I’ve been meaning to migrate my gaming PC over to it.
I’ve put Alpine in as a firewall host for a few months now and have been very impressed with it. For years I’d just been using it as a docker image, ignoring that it was a respectable distro in its own right.
And as always I’ve been having a good time with OpenBSD as my router, and more recently as an eccentric laptop OS.
FreeBSD exists too…Distro hop around, far and wide!
You don’t need an argument or to justify your avoidance of systemd to anyone else, you can have your own preferences and sense of taste.
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My advice, unless you have a really good reason to go with another init / system management suite… Don’t. systemd already won that battle.
Sure, you could potentially build something less tightly coupled. And lose all of the nice things, like services, timers, logging… All in a single, unified, nice package and coherent strategy.
While you are waiting for a better init system, systemd is now pretty much part of modern Linux, along with wayland, pipewire, nftables…
That does not mean systemd is perfect, I still believe binary logs are less reliable than text based logs, and the monolithic design of systemd is going to bite back sooner or later. However, avoiding systemd just because you don’t like it? You’re just making your life harder than it needs to be now. Kinda like the Amish refusing to use new technology.
Still, your life, your choices. I may not always agree with a choice, but I will respect them. For your question, my vote goes to Devuan or, if there is an Arch equivalent, use that.
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Might as well hop over to a BSD if you don’t want systemd. There is gentoo and devuan otherwise.
systemd makes life easier for maintainers, hence the wide adoption. Poettering might be… “unpalatable”, but the pros outweigh the cons.
Have you considered that your problem might actually be more with GNOME than systemd? IMO gnome sucks donkey doodle.
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There’s an old movie that says this better than I will: “You keep using that word, it does not mean what you think it means.”
Typically ‘monolithic’ is a contrast to ‘modular’ and the systemd binaries and architecture are very much modular. With a straight face, systemd is not monolithic. The ecosystem around systemd is tightly integrated, sure, and maybe that’s what you’re describing as monolithic.
Init systems have to deliver minimal levels of functionality and that’s always going to be integrated together to make a meaningful platform for managing services on your computer systems. systemd grows this because the single-system-image of the 1980’s is now hyperscaler flow of containers and VM’s across racks of servers. That’s got a whole bunch more services to manage, needs tools for migrating systems and providing clones of base systems with appropriate security levels. Then system-level integrity with a chain of trust from the UEFI is a real problem for laptop users travelling for business. These bring a need to enumerate what’s available at startup and to set up the system correctly, systemd is a reasonable suite of tools for contemporary, not old-world, problems.
Maybe you don’t need these things, so I hope you find the tools that help you get the most out of your computer hardware for solving the problems you face.
K3n.
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Fair point, but i seriosly doubt Devuan and Void linux maintainers are going to bend the knee, their stance on things is very opinionated.
Id be ready to bet Alpine dgaf, but im not sure