Hello:

On 22 Jun 2026 at 9:14, Didier Kryn via Dng wrote:

> > ... the time will come when one will not be able to boot a PC
> > (or whatever replaces it) if some form of systemd is not present
> > somewhere in the hardware.

> Next major metastases of the Systemd cancer: systemd-initramfs,
> systemd-grub, systemd-bios.
> ... hope there will remain some libre hardware ...
Hope is in short supply for us these days.

What would the alternative be?

A different hardware platform?
It will probably be (by design) very expensive and not in any way
guaranteed to be safe.

That being the most probable case, I have already decided that I will
not be upgrading from my ca. 2007 Sun U24 WS (Intel Q9550 / 8Gb) or
any my peripherals, save maybe a busted PS, video card, any one of my
monitors or HDDs.

It is all hardware that ran perfectly well on Linux over 10 years
ago, has done so on Devuan since Jesse and *still* does so today on
Devuan Daedalus.

The most remarkable being my trusty Umax S-6E SCSI scanner (1995) and
a discarded WD MyBook Live (2014) modified and working as a faux 1.0
TB NAS running OpenWRT.

I have all but decided not to upgrade to Devuan Excalibur and remain
on Daedalus, I do not think it will be worth the hassle and grief
that will come with it and most importantly, I have not found a
reason to upgrade: things work just fine as they are now.

I may even chance (eventually) rolling a custom kernel tailored for
just the hardware present in my box and run Linux from from an
immutable image.

Just have to figure out a proper way to run my box in a highly
protected space, isolated from the web for work/office crap and at
the same time have web access by other means (for email, banking,
ecommerce, file sharing, downloads, video streaming, etc.)

If there is hardware out there that has been running non-stop for
years on old but reliable hardware with archived versions of Linux
(and other platforms), I think I just *may* be able to do the same.

Best,

A.