linuxmemes

Why should I not use systemd?

Scans room

Windows 11.

"systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time" -Churchill, if he had been a nerd

Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn't need Linux for work reasons.

As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd? I use Mint and I don't remember having to interact with that kind of low-level nonsense. The distro maintainers can use whatever reasoning they want to pick these details.

Void, because it works really well on my super low-resource chromebook!

So the old init.d system was better? Come on people, let's stop infighting. I have zero preference on init systems. You know why? Because they're just plumbing. Stop this nonsense. Do I click on an init system? Do I use the init system to check my email? Or play games? No. I know poettering can be controversial, but let's just move on. Run freebsd if you're so butt hurt.

ReactOS.

I have no moral or philosophical objections to the design of Windows NT, just the company that makes it and the enshittification. If ReactOS ever becomes stable enough to be daily used I would use it. For now I use LinuxMint and Steam OS at home.

Probably Artix, because it's like Arch, and I use Arch btw

systemd is fine. The only people I've ever heard complain about it are lonely neckbeards pretending like their opinion somehow matters.

I've used Debian as a server system since it was using init.d. And do you know what I found? systemd is easier. And the fact that Debian of all distros decided to use it says a lot.

I have to say as someone who uses NixOS I love systemd, because it makes a lot of things very easy. For example hardening services ( systemd-analyze security) or replacing cron (system timer).

What's wrong with systemd?

An hour in and no mention of Slackware yet?

Alpine.

Have used crux but using low end / old hardware results in almost permanent building software.

OpenWRT

System service managers like systemd, OpenRC, runit, or SysVinit often come down to user preference. While these systems are crucial for initializing and managing services on servers, where uptime, resource allocation, and specific daemon behaviors are important, their impact on a typical desktop or laptop is generally minimal.

For most personal devices, the primary functions of a service manager occur largely out of sight. As long as the system boots reliably and applications run smoothly, the underlying service manager rarely registers as a significant factor in the daily user experience.

For many, including myself, systemd simply works without much fuss. My choice to stick with it isn't due to strong conviction or deep technical analysis, but rather the simple fact that I've rarely, if ever, had to interact with it directly. For my personal desktop and laptop, it reliably handles booting, service management, and shutdown in the background. If it's not broken and isn't hindering my daily computing, there's no compelling reason to explore alternatives.

Debian that i haven't updated in 10 years

Debian, installed without systemd as per the wiki. So far I've not hit any issues, whilst I've recently ended up diving through both kernel and systemd code to find the root cause of an issue I was hitting on one server. I could have just bodged past it, but I wanted to actually understand what the issue was, and what else it was going to affect.

GNU cat

You mean GNU cat?

Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they're both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).

If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that's small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.

I don't daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my "favorite".