I’m planning to move over to Guix over NixOS, as soon as my current situation improves and possibly import a new libre respecting laptop (Star Labs is thankfully available in India). I do have a very old laptop with a Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM with Guix installed already, and what has come to my attention is that it uses shepherd.

I’m not actually against or for systemd, in fact, I am not really sure why I should even care - maybe it is because I’m still not on to the level of a power user. Since I’m starting to learn kernel basics to prepare for GNU/Hurd contributions in the nearest possible future and shepherd seems to be what the GNU folks will be using, is there any reason why I should even care about the freedom of init system?

Edit: I’m asking this because I came across this blog - What is systemd and Why Should I Care? and also because Guix uses shepherd, and I’m not sure how I’ll be affected.

  • taladar@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    I used openrc for years before switching to systemd on my Gentoo systems and indeed it was the default there at the time (might still be a default, defaults on Gentoo tend to be very soft suggestions unlike some other distros). It had nothing particularly compelling compared to any of the other init script based systems as far as I remember. Certainly had all the same major downsides.

    The very reason it is so hard to provide init scripts for alternative systems should be a hint that systemd actually does quite a lot of useful things because I certainly don’t consider it nearly as hard writing a systemd unit for a daemon that lacks on these days as it was to write an init script back in the bad old days. Especially if you give a shit about not just copy&pasting and then tweaking a random other init script for a total maintenance nightmare or care about it being usable on both Debian- and RedHat distros.