[TriLUG] Recommendations for a systemd-less Linux distribution

[William Sutton via TriLUG]

I have been using Gentoo off and on since the early 2000's.  I wrote the 
definitive HOWTO for configuring a Matrox G450 under Gentoo[1].

While there can be issues with some of the install guides, the Gentoo 
RAID+LVM guide has usually been pretty solid for most of that time[2][3].

I want to dispel one myth you perpetuated about Gentoo.  You don't have to 
compile everything.  If you start with a stage 3 tarball, most of your 
system utilities already come compiled.  And you can install -bin 
(binary only) packages for things like OpenOffice and Firefox.  And if you 
do want to run a machine with less horsepower (say a laptop), you can 
always compile on a faster machine and distribute the packages.

Regards,

William Sutton

[1] https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-60278-start-0.html
[2] Ever since Gentoo rolled in the UDEV-200 release, udev on Gentoo has 
dynamically assigned RAID device numbers at boot time based on when the 
volumes were detected.  Unless you assign a super-minor number to the 
device and configure the device UUIDs in /etc/mdadm.conf, the result can 
be a maddening randomization of what gets mounted where from boot to boot. 
At the same time, they rolled in network device name reassignment, so many 
people saw eth* become ens*.  This was particularly bad for people who 
used Gentoo for routing and suddenly had to figure out what devices now 
belonged to which routing rules[3].
[3] Yes, I footnoted a footnote.  This is why, while I'm OK using Gentoo 
for a home machine, I would never use it for a production business system. 
Things have a tendency to break without warning.

On Wed, 15 Jul 2015, Gregory Woodbury via TriLUG wrote:

> 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.
> -- 
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