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.
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.
https://without-systemd.org/ too.
And there's MX and AntiX too, if wanting something like Debian/Ubuntu but with init-freedom.
And several other Devuan respins.
Or even PCLinuxOS. While it uses rpm package format, it uses apt as its package manager, so you don't even need to learn a new package manager. And of course, no systemd.
Dozens more options too.
No need to wait past tipping points where harm is done. There have always been easy options. At least in all 22.5 years I've been using Linux. That never stopped. Just a corporation and its eager stooges perpetrated a psyop to mislead people into thinking systemd was the one true way. It's not. It never was. That was marketing lies.
Init-freedom ftw. :) Choice is good. Clean code is good. Maintainable and easily forkable code is good. UNIX philosophy is good (esp. "do one thing, well"). KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is good.
While systemd may be free software in name/license only, in practice, it's abusive. Social rot. Brain rot. Not good. Avoid.
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.
Btw
🫡