The latest changes implemented in the Systemd repo, related to or prompted by age-verification laws, have made many people unhappy (I suppose links about this aren't necessary). This has led to a surge in Systemd forks during the last days ("surge" because there have always been plenty of forks). Here are some forks that explicitly mention those changes as their reason for forking (rough time ordering taken from the fork page):
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paramazo/systemd "The systemd System and Service Manager without age verification"
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ganitam/systemd "Systemd fork just before the Age Verification addition. Hoping more capable developers and maintainers do same.."
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GSYT-Productions/systemd-fork "The systemd System and Service Manager, without the stupid Age Verification"
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speedythesnail/unret arded-systemd "The systemd System and Service Manager, without the ret arded age-verification commits"
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ta13579/systemd "The systemd System and Service Manager WITHOUT THE FUCKING AGE CHECKS"
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r4shsec/systemd-no-age-verification "This is systemd but without the age verification made via pull request https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40978"
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Pingasmaster/fightthesystemd "Systemd without the nonsense: no age verification, no lighthouse built-in."
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Jeffrey-Sardina/system "Liberated systemd -- no surveillance. Ever."
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HaplessIdiot/systemd-saneagecheck "The systemd System and Service Manager with age verification bypass and polling rate options for said feature"
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Queer-Coded-LGBTQ/systemd-fuck-california "The systemd System and Service Manager, but without age bs added in."
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Codiak540/unshitted-systemd "A fork of systemd aiming to strip the Age verification. Sue me california."
Hopefully the energy of this reaction won't be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.
Good luck trying to maintain the mammoth that is systemd... why not just switch to an alternative init system and focus your efforts on contributing to those, instead of trying to single-handedly maintain such a huge codebase?
You got any good tips on alternatives?
https://nosystemd.org/
They can be a bit overemotional about systemd's issues, but their list of init systems and distros is rather exhaustive
It's all nerdy stuff, usually installed via CLI. I think Devuan is the most user friendly, at least it has an installer
I've used Void, Devuan, Chimera and Guix. They're all cool, and I did learn interesting things as a developer, but I wouldn't advise switching to one of those distros just for the current drama. Wait until it actually gets bad, there will hopefully be user-friendly distros to address the situation.
Ah, well. I don't think I'll be changing my distro from Arch unless this becomes a real issue for me. Thanks for the recommendation though.
There are even more options to do arch without systemd than are listed on distrowatch.
Btw
If you want something more featureful, OpenRC is decent.
I usually use runit, which is much more lightweight, which I like.
You can try out distros with different inits in VMs and see what you like. Or if you're the distro-hopping kind, just distro-hop.
I don't know. I don't think I'll ever leave Arch as long as it's available.