[TriLUG] Recommendations for a systemd-less Linux distribution

[Gregory Woodbury via TriLUG]

Paul (and other readers):

Systemd and other entangling software products are indeed a symptom of
a industry-wide
movement to make Linux distributions more like the other dominant
platforms (Windows and
Mac) by not requiring the user to have to know anything about the
underlying OS in order
to use the computer for typical PC-user tasks.

I do *not* like systemd. It violates all sorts of good practices that
the FOSS community
has learned over the years. If it actually limited itself to being an
init system without requiring
changes in other software it might be interesting. I have managed to
learn enough about
systemd's internals to be able to get it somewhat tamed, but I will
not let systemd manage
any of my own computers. Without wanting to engage in any more systemd
bashing, there
are lots of problems with it and its developers.

If you want to stay with an RPM-based distro, it looks like CentOS 6.x
is perhaps the only
option. However it does have a known end-of-life and merely delays
another change.
While Gentoo has not "pledged" to remain systemd free, it has stated
that there will be
options during the install process to maintain user's choice on init systems.

The main difficulty with Gentoo is that it can take a while to get an
installation done
because all packages are compiled from source and CPU speed is key to the time
required. If appropriately generic options are chosen during
installation, and the option
is chosen to generate binary packages, installations after the first
one can be much
faster. There is also no installation program; one has to read and
follow the "Handbook"
directions. The Handbooks are getting better, but there still needs to
be an "experienced"
user level compact install directions.  With a little work one can
also add RPM capabilities
to Gentoo, but the problem then devolves to where to find sufficiently
generic RPMs
that don't bring in too many dependencies.  If you can, try Gentoo and
elect to make
binary packages for each piece you do install.