Sorry? What are DAC and MAC? You've lost me.

I don't care how it is written really. And there aren't any alternatives to systemD aside from SysV OR independent init systems like found in Slackware or OpenRC. I don't know about OpenRC to be honest, but clearly it is not an alternative to SystemD since almost nobody is using it.

And this is the whole point of SystemFree, for those using SystemD to have a REAL choice, and for the choice to be real it has to offer a viable alternative. The only way to do that when talking about a blob like SystemD is to replace both SystemD init and fork and make independent again the useful and/or important parts of the SystemD blob. You cannot do this simply with an alternative init. Nobody can move away from SystemD to ONLY an init. They need alternatives to EVERYTHING SystemD offers, even so far as a SystemD emulation module so that SystemD can actually be easily replaced. How in the world do you think anyone can replace SystemD with only an init System? The system would be stripped bare and not run at all, and much of the software would not work even if you had managed to make the system run. That's the whole idea behind SystemFree, to make that possible. Any of the BLOB SystemD tools need to be freed as well, so that other init systems like SysV can keep using them and keep those pieces of software compatible with OTHER init systems, not only SystemFree.

Discretionary access control (traditional GNU/Linux permissions) and mandatory access control (Selinux, apparmor etc etc)

Suppose someone wanted to use enlightenment on Slackware. I know there used to be a slackbuild for it. Probably there still is. But how would it run if it needs systemd?

The slackbuild probably installs dependencies in some form or another. I don't know how hard the "systemD dependency" of Enlightenment is, but it says on their website "SystemD" under dependencies.

I think if you build Enlightenment on Slackware from source you'd find out.

Anyways, Slackware and SystemD is an interesting study case. I think as time goes on Slackware will have to come up with more and more hacks of their own to be able to run SystemD dependent software that they need. My fear is that this burden will become impossible for non-systemD distroes in the future.

A lot of this is just wool-gathering. We're not programmers. We're not going to create a new init. End of story.

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If you rewind to the 90s... or even the early 00s - you will be in a time where the standard OS for a desktop or laptop computer was MS Windows (with the expensive alternative of the Mac). The reality is that not much has changed.

In the early days of Linux, most early adopters were what you might call "geeks" - i.e. those who were not afraid to get their hands dirty, use the terminal, manually configure things, build from source, etc.

Fast forward to the present day - and there are not simply less of those people, in fact there are many more of them, but they're outnumbered, because sadly for some "Linux got popular".

But there are also many types of entitled people, who want everything exactly to their tastes - out of the box - but are unwilling to do any work whatsoever towards that. This includes both some of those who like/don't care about systemd and also some of those who (vocally) oppose it. What you have in effect is a tiny minority of x86 desktop/laptop users and within that tiny minority you have a majority who like to tell you what everyone wants.

In terms of the world of Linux users running typical distributions on desktop/laptop x86 machines, it's still hovering around 1% of the "marketshare" and still irrelevant compared to Android. The average person has barely heard of Linux, let alone systemd.

As with the 90s or the 00s you have basically the same choices:

- Do the extra legwork to avoid "the mainstream product" and use what you want to use. The first step towards this is to become distribution agnostic - or even OS agnostic - being enslaved to one particular Linux distribution/OS and sticking with that distribution throughout, what you may deem, poor decisions, etc is what really amounts to fan club type behaviour. The second step is to learn how to configure things for yourself, to remove your reliance on software like systemd and other people.

- Use the "automagic", preconfigured distribution "as is" and stop whinging unless you're willing to learn how to develop software and contribute something or donate money... you can't have $YOUR_INIT_SYSTEM how you want it, configured to your tastes and confirming to your favoured design methodology if you're not willing to do any work.

Facing facts - Linux and a lot of other free software besides, is now very much corporate funded and influenced. systemd is the small symptom of a wider problem. systemd is here to stay, because it's what the corporate world have chosen - and the corporate world doesn't necessarily choose the best, they choose what suits a given business model. Linux is now the corporate playground of the likes of google, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, IBM, Cisco, Amazon AWS, facebook, et al - they are paying the bills, not the < 1% of hobbyist distribution users - the good old days are gone forever.

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But you're happy to complain about it? Speaks volumes. There is no init system called "systemD", anymore than there's any init system called "SystemD". There is one called "systemd" though.


So runit isn't an init system ? What is it then, a package manager ? Doesn't Void Linux use runit as it's init system, yes? OpenRC is really just a "frontend" more or less for SYSVINIT.

I'm sorry to say, but this thread like most other systemd threads are rather pointless and don't solve anything. As touched on above; if all you're going to do is recycle the same arguments discussed many, many times over now, then it doesn't bring anymore "choice" or "freedom" to people using Linux, that have a perceived lack of "choice" and "freedom". Another way of saying it is; threads like this one are basically just nothing more than "hot air" (for or against).

Actually writing and providing an "alternative" to systemd yourself might actually solve something (assuming there's anything to "solve"). Hazel puts it quite well in post #21 above.

As far as Enlightenment is concerned; if you bother to do a simple search, then you'll not only find a list of distro's that don't use systemd, at least one of those same distro's includes Enlightenment. I also found a post on Reddit I believe with that same simple search where someone talks about running Enlightenment, without using systemd as their init system. I also see no reason why you couldn't just install whatever library of systemd Enlightenment requires, while using a different init system as the init system.

At the end of the day, and if it bothered me that much, I can see at least two "choices";

1. Don't use it and vote with your feet.
2. Learn programming and either write something yourself (as opposed to just whingeing about systemd), or modify Enlightenment and remove it's systemd dependency or similar - Gentoo developers seem to have managed to separate various things from systemd, so others can still use something other than systemd as their init system. So it obviously is very possible to do.

But you'd rather whinge and complain instead of doing something about it (and unfortunately far from alone in that respect) ...

Well, that's the whole point of the thread, if you read it carefully, we are going to create a new init system, programmers or not. Creating a good new init system demands a good plan, without a plan nobody can create a good init system. Plan and policy.

So, as I said, we are creating SystemFree right here on the thread, using our brains only, the theoretical version.

We can "think" about it all we like, that doesn't make it happen. I was thinking about a pizza an hour or so ago - I still had to physically go to the pizza place to get it...

That's the whole point. What when those become just part of the SYSTEMd blob or fully dependent on something SySTemD? Then it will require a fork to even install that single piece of software, and this is the whole point of SystemFree. To make a new init and fork all the necessary parts of SysTeMd to make them free and independent of SYStemD and each others and make sure they live on as indepdendent software and is not part of a blob.

If you are just going to whine in here, then I don't really care what you see as choices. I'm trying to have a productive discussion here about how we make a SysTemD replacement called SystemFree.

Well, you wouldn't have gone to get the pizza if you never thought about it in the first place or you were thinking about pineapple cake instead.

The latest enlightenment seems to be in FreeBSD ports as well.

There seems to be "--disable-systemd" build flags for both the "efl" and "enlightenment" components. Even then, these are build dependencies, so not clear if systemd is actually needed at run time.

Again, just "thinking about it" doesn't make it happen. Many people "think about" world peace... has it happened yet? No, it hasn't.

And for the last time, there already ARE other init systems available. So again, what's yet another "alternative" going to solve? If it were going to solve anything, then we likely wouldn't even be talking about system bloody d. Again, if you're interested in doing something about it, then either learn programming or use something else. Otherwise "just talking about it" is just as pointless as just whingeing about systemd...

Any in case, I've wasted enough time with this pointless discussion...

Yet we could easily choose between Xfree86 and Xorg back in the days. There was no tie in between SysV and Xfree, or some libs and Xfree that forced you to use Xfree or end up with a non-working system or enough work for thousands of people. GNU didn't hardcore into any of their software that you HAD to use Xorg, take it or leave it. Nobody did. It was relatively easy to choose. In fact, you could chooose anything and replace it basically, with relative ease. No part of the "distro" was interlocked. You could piece it together easily yourself. Xfree didn't force you to use Gnome, nor did SysV and gnome did not force you to use Xfree or SysV.

This is the nature of the situation, the one that might lead us down the bad path where nothing is replaceable and everyone has to run the same distro with different colours and bling, but yet all the same hardware. That's no choice at all. SystemD is locking down everything, and taking out one piece and replacing it with another is becoming increasingly difficult, and my prediction is that SystemD wants to lock down everything. That's where a split is inevitable in the form of the people who accept to use Ubuntu and those who don't. The hacks will get uglier and uglier and larger and larger, and more amount of time for the developers will be spent on hacks to manage to run a SystemD free distro. In the end, some will have to give up. Dependencies, dependencies and more dependencies.

GNU/Linux IMO must remain an OS and software environment as it were, different pieces making up a final product and being able to switch any of those pieces for alternatives quite easily, not with thousands of developers.