Hi Nick.

Welcome on board!

Nick - 22.09.24, 12:03:48 CEST:
> Anyway, on the development PC, I am not sure if it's my imagination but
> it just seems so much lighter and faster than what I was running before.
> It might be because I was on Debian via Ubuntu via Mint, whereas now
> I'm on Debian via Devuan, and there could be less cruft added. And in
> particular the bootup seems a lot quicker, which is surprising really
> since one of the claims about systemd is that its dependency based
> startup should be quicker. Hmm.

That is a convenient myth of the Systemd people and always has been.

I suppose you used the standard init of Devuan SysVInit? It uses startpar
by default since quite a bit, which is a kind of, you probably guessed it:
Dependency based parallel startup. AFAIK it has been developed by SUSE
developers and ported over to Debian.

I use Runit and booting is blazing fast with it.

> Anyway I have always found systemd to
> be quite oppressive, since I haven't got time to waste on sysadmin
> tasks beyond quickly searching and maybe downloading a script or
> whatever. To create systemd units is quite a learning curve, and
> although I've done that in the past I've never really been sure I did
> it right. And I could not be bothered learning the syntax for things
> line systemctl, journalctl and whatnot -- I'd rather use simpler
> commands to view logs and such.

It is in part the amount of implicit policy and for me unpredictable
behavior or Systemd that caused me to switch away from Debian. And that
all in one approach instead of do one thing and do one thing well. And the
"it is not a bug but exactly how we intended it and we know better than
you" kind of arrogance of some Systemd developers.

Granted Plasma is also kind of all in one, but it is still composed of
different separately packages components. And I can configure it easily
enough to do what I like and does not come with hand holding me with a
stance of "we know better than you".

I nowadays use Devuan and Alpine Linux.

Best,
--
Martin