[svlug] My next computer and its support

[Akkana Peck]

> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 07:47:59AM -0800, norm at dad.org wrote:
> >         And the next version of it, RHEL 7, will use systemd instead of init.
> > 
> >               I know almost nothing about systemd except that using it will
> >               mean I will have to learn a lot of new stuff and that one of
> >               its authors is the author of the RHEL 6 sound system, which has
> >               given me endless grief. For those two reasons, I would like,
> >               all other things being equal, to avoid it.
> > 
> > I'm thinking of switching from Red Hat to Ubuntu, but have no idea how much

Dan Ritter writes:
> I share your concerns about systemd, and some others. Ubuntu
> and Debian have switched over to using systemd.
> 
> However, Debian does not mandate systemd. It's perfectly
> reasonable to run a stable Debian system with sysvinit, OpenRC

That's true. However, it won't help the "learn a lot of new stuff"
issue. Even sysvinit differed quite a bit between Debian and Redhat
systems, so if you do a lot of mucking with the init system and
you're used to doing things with chkconfig and other Redhat-derived
tools, you'll have to learn a lot of new stuff anyway if you switch
to any Debian-derived system, whether or not it uses systemd.

Your other concern (the endless grief) depends on how much mucking
around you do with the init system, and on what level. For me, I've
found Debian's switch to systemd to be fairly painless, and I assume
the same would have been true under Ubuntu. There are a few things
I'd hoped I'd be able to do with systemd (things it was supposed to
be able to do) and none of those have panned out, but they were
things that were already hard to do under Debian's sysvinit too,
so no loss.

But really, the best thing is to try it. We don't know what sort of
init system mucking-about you need to do, so why not set up another
partition (or a spare machine), install Ubuntu and see what you
think? Or maybe even set up several partitions and install several
different distros so you can compare how comfortable they feel for
your use case.

Dan's advice about desktops is important, too: when you're
evaluating distros don't judge them mainly on their default desktop,
since you can install any window manager or desktop on any Linux
distro. You don't have to use Unity on Ubuntu.

Sorry, don't know about paid support for any distro, so if that's an
important factor that might need to be the first thing you research.

        ...Akkana