It's kind of amazing how many veteran Linux greyhairs I've seen, downstream of the age-check-in-systemd decision, saying well I guess I need to get comfortable with a BSD now.
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@llorenzin If I was building containers or basic infra right now, alpine is decisively minimalist in terms of both system requirements and drama.
@mhoye @llorenzin systemd mandating the nesting feature be turned on - which increases attack surface substantially - in order to run in LXC was responsible for my first install of Devuan within the past few months. I'm really hoping Devuan gets a lasting influx of donations & talent, realistically if I do eventually start switching to BSD it's gonna take me years to accomplish it.
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@mhoye I maybe don't fully understand the issue.. but are they not just adding an extra field for birthday to a file that already has your name, location, and email address? Most people leave all that blank anyhow.. they just want a standard place for it should you want to use it.. systemd is not making anyone use it or ask for it.
@hurt138 @mhoye I’m not looking for a fight here, but many people find voluntary compliance with authoritarianism distasteful, and feel that aspects like this should be resisted as much as possible. Sometimes resistance looks like marching in the street, and sometimes it looks like a fistful of sand in the gears, starting with “there is no standard place to store that data, you’ll have to think of something else.”
There’s some additional complexity around the speed at which systemd rapidly replaced large parts of unix with an obviously terrible design, and because there is no easy outlet for that resentment, it sometimes surfaces in related subjects like this.
Finally, the compliance-in-advance is intended to improve the “saleability” of linux by large corporations to other large corporations, but many contributors do not value the concept of “saleability” and are concerned that the platform’s direction is increasingly set by companies that do not share their social goals.
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@hurt138 @mhoye I’m not looking for a fight here, but many people find voluntary compliance with authoritarianism distasteful, and feel that aspects like this should be resisted as much as possible. Sometimes resistance looks like marching in the street, and sometimes it looks like a fistful of sand in the gears, starting with “there is no standard place to store that data, you’ll have to think of something else.”
There’s some additional complexity around the speed at which systemd rapidly replaced large parts of unix with an obviously terrible design, and because there is no easy outlet for that resentment, it sometimes surfaces in related subjects like this.
Finally, the compliance-in-advance is intended to improve the “saleability” of linux by large corporations to other large corporations, but many contributors do not value the concept of “saleability” and are concerned that the platform’s direction is increasingly set by companies that do not share their social goals.
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@mcc @mhoye Ugh. Alright. Yeah:
But we're not strictly out of the woods yet:
"Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy."
from https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-04-2025-06/#_freebsd_core_team
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@mhoye Not that the BSDs are in any way a bad option, but don't forget that it's entirely reasonable to use Debian without systemd. I'm doing it now.
It's well-supported by active volunteers:
And there are other good options: Slackware and Alpine stand out. Gentoo is a bit heavy with its config syntax, but it's a super solid option.
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@kaidenshi @mhoye When I tried it, it seemed like a decent framework missing volunteers. For instance, IIRC there was a history function in xbps that was largely unpopulated.
What killed Void for me was an inability to use a dependency system to let me manage binary kmods for ZFS, and vigorous opposition to the idea from their developers.
I wish there were more answers for how to handle data integrity and self-healing without ZFS. Seems like a useful concept.
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@kaidenshi @mhoye When I tried it, it seemed like a decent framework missing volunteers. For instance, IIRC there was a history function in xbps that was largely unpopulated.
What killed Void for me was an inability to use a dependency system to let me manage binary kmods for ZFS, and vigorous opposition to the idea from their developers.
I wish there were more answers for how to handle data integrity and self-healing without ZFS. Seems like a useful concept.
@mhoye @mason it’s a small and opinionated team for sure. My biggest issues with Void are the lack of full disk encryption in the installer (makes it sketchy for laptops when traveling) and the developers’ hard rule against browser forks making me have to build Librewolf myself or use a third party repo.
Still, it’s the distro that I feel most at home in, though these days I run OpenBSD instead.
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It's kind of amazing how many veteran Linux greyhairs I've seen, downstream of the age-check-in-systemd decision, saying well I guess I need to get comfortable with a BSD now. Thirty plus years of deep-grooved Debian/RedHat muscle memory to a one, quietly tidying up and looking for the exits.
I'm not leaving Linux, but I am leaving systemd. I've been in the process, slowly, for quite some time, but took some real concrete steps more recently. Then the systemd age field BS popped up and erased any remaining doubts I had.
So, unless Debian brings back a non-systemd option, I'll be switching the remainder of my machines to Devuan.
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