Linux

I've never had systemd break either

steady hand and a magnetized needle is all I need. kernel is bloat

Boot speed is meaningless. Having to almost never reboot is everything.

Use what works for you.

Develop what scratches your itch.

Don't tell OSS devs who are volunteering unpaid labor what they should do for you.

If you want a solution that's non-systemd go for it. If it doesn't exist make it or pay someone to do so. Write from scratch or fork a project and get to work. That's the way of the Bazaar.

I'll be in my unenlightened "things work for me good enough" Linux world using what works. Systemd is fine and rarely gives me problems. Actually, I'm not even sure I can remember any.

Huge thank you's to the devs who make this all possible. You rock!

for script in $(find /etc/init/start); do
    exec $script &
done

while true; do sleep; done

Undoubtedly the best init system that exists. No fluff, just starts services.

Honestly for desktop usage it doesn't really matter. All inits have their idiosyncrasies ("A stop job is running for Session"/logging hell on openrc/etc). But for managing a fleet of bare-metal servers I find systemd to be the best, most polished one out of the lot.

After over a decade using systemd in arch and Debian, I never had any direct issues with it. However, I never truly got my head around it or got comfortable with how it functioned. I recently swapped arch for void which uses runit, and after over a month using it I to an amazed both how clean and simple it is, how everything just works, how easy to interact and use runit is and am blown away by boot and shutdown times. My arch / systemd setup was heavily optimised for boot, and I thought was quick, but runit starts in about 4 seconds and shutdown is about 2 seconds.

Systemd is mile ahead of the others, thing is that solves problems that you most likely don’t have or even know that exist. To boot a regular machine or small server pretty much any init system is good.

I'm sure this post isn't going to be controversial at all lol

Systemd has been putting a lot of effort into eliminating the need for SUID binaries with run0 and polkit integrations, so I'm curious if other init systems are doing anything similar.

Advanced Distro-hopper over here: I am actually fine with cachyOS. If I want to leave systemd only good alternative I found is atrix. Someone tried their new stable release of 2026? Arch + openrc + Wayland + pipewire + KDE would be my usecase.

I don't ever have breakage due to systemd.

These days OpenRC even has user-services. And writing a simple OpenRC service file is barely more complex than a systemd unit file, maybe even simpler, because it's readable bash, not some declarative DSL.

Obviously there is in no way feature parity between those two, that's the point, personally the one thing I'd like to have is something similar to systemd's timers (which I actually prefer to old-school cron) built into OpenRC, but most other things I can live without.

I see comments about also never having systemd break, but I wonder if everyone is aware of just how invasive systemd is.

Having DNS resolution issues? Probably systemd related (systemd-resolved). Having any issue with ${HOME}, including encryption? Probably systemd (systemd-homed). Getting system log messages painfully slow? Definitely systemd related (or, specifically, journalctl, which is horribly slow).

Ever noticed how Linux is getting slower and slower to boot? Absolutely systemd. Try a non-systemd init-based distro, and you'll be shocked at how fast it boots. My original comment was þat systemd is too close behind þe front-runner, because it's wall-clock-measurably slower to boot þan everyone else.