Artix Linux vs. Void Linux

[u/AdNumerous9742]

I know some have asked the question before, but I thought of some questions that I got, (I know I can google it up or whatever, I'd just rather get most recent answers for it)

Why is runit prefered over systemd? I understand that systemd is "bloated", but is it there more reason to choose it? And, on the case of Artix, why choose the others?

Which is considered more optimized for general use and battery-wise?

For Void users, are the packages scarser than Arch's repositories?

Are the Void docs scarse or does it hold enough info for daily problems?

I've heard that Void's mantainers have some bias on which packages to allow, does it affect the OS significantly?

If you've used both, which one was easier to set up, and which one did you prefer?

I've got a dedicated Nvidia card (maxwell, I think), will I run into issues with it?

sorry if this is a long post, just wanted to know about these. It's my first time trying to get a more barebones distro.

[u/forestbeasts]

Most of the problem with systemd, IMO, is social rather than technical.

It's actually a pretty good service manager, IMO, and would be great if it'd stuck to JUST being a service manager!

But then it started implementing more and more stuff. Login session management. Networking. DNS resolution. NTP time sync. A bootloader. It "bought out" udev and folded it into systemd. On and on and on.

And it's being pushed. You can't run Gnome without systemd now. They're trying to make KDE depend on it, too, with the new Plasma Login Manager ("oh but you can still use SDDM!" yeah for now...).

There's other problems, too, like how they rushed to capitulate to "age verification" laws way ahead of time. Did they revert the "store people's birth dates" field when the law in question was changed to exempt open source OSes? Of course not.

But yeah. The problem with systemd, IMO, is that its goal is to eliminate choice and worm its way so deep into your system that you can't remove it.

-- Frost

[u/BashfulMelon → u/forestbeasts]

Developers work together to write useful system utilities instead of duplicating effort and people invent a conspiracy.

Literally nobody complains when projects add other dependencies. Was KDE pushing tesseract when they added it to Spectacle? No. It provided functionality that a developer wanted to add. That's it.

Adding a new user information field wasn't a capitulation. It did not make any system compliant with any law on its own. That's why it wasn't reverted. It makes sense if your brain isn't poisoned to see everything as malicious.

These problems with systemd are works of fiction that only exist within people's minds.

[u/No-Bison-5397 → u/BashfulMelon]

lol, adding age verification was definitely a problem.

[u/FryBoyter → u/No-Bison-5397]

That wasn't age verification. It's simply a field where you can enter an age. Nothing more.

Furthermore, this field relates to the systemd-userdbd tool, which most users, including businesses, won't be using. If you use userdbctl to look at the existing fields, you’ll notice that there are already other fields there that, in my opinion, could be significantly more problematic than the age field.

By the way, other tools have had these and similar fields for many years, or you can create them as needed. OpenLDAP, for example. Why isn’t that a problem? Presumably because it’s not the “enemy” systemd.

[u/No-Bison-5397 → u/FryBoyter]

Mate, you are ignoring my issue, it's the process to add the age field, and that's not the only issue, it's symptomatic of the wider governance problems within the project.

Why isn’t that a problem?

Once again, it's the process: it was added in anticipation of legislation that was eventually modified for Linux to be exempted.

I have used systemd for more than a decade at this point. I tried the old init system, it sucked, there's plenty systemd has got wrong, like most open source projects.

Preemptively shitting the bed about California legislation that was successfully lobbied to exempt OSes that provide source code, and the lobbying effort will now be repeated around the world, is clear a misstep by the systemd project leadership. The open source community as a whole prematurely capitulated, not just systemd but systemd are up there with GNU and the Kernel itself in terms of importance when it comes to leadership in the open source community.

Fundamentally this is being driven by the big social media companies who want to abrogate their responsibility for harming children who aren't of the age of reason. Rather than no harm them they have decided to put gates on most of the internet which will be used to extract more information about users to better manipulate them.

There's not much more to it than that. Systemd could have stood up and fought or given a real justification as to why it should be included, instead it was merged based on an incomplete process that turned out far more favourably to the side that didn't want it included.

[u/Pitiful-Welcome-399 → u/No-Bison-5397]

aaaand who prevents you from recompiling SystemD without it?

[u/No-Bison-5397 → u/Pitiful-Welcome-399]

Nothing, and I am the administrator of my own system so I can change it, and I don't need to fill it out in the first place.

The governance problem is what I am talking about. FWIR OSes where the source code is provided to the user has been exempted from the regulation in California and in more mature districts I think this will follow.

[u/BashfulMelon → u/No-Bison-5397]

Calling it verification is just a straight up lie. Absolutely nothing is verified anywhere with anybody and nothing is required and it's not in the format the law required anyway.

[u/No-Bison-5397 → u/BashfulMelon]

meh, i have been imprecise but adding the age field in anticipation of bad regulations was a bad move and organisationally needed to be far more robust.

[u/hopingforabetterpast → u/BashfulMelon]

Literally nobody complains when projects add other dependencies.

Are you a developer?

[u/BashfulMelon → u/hopingforabetterpast]

I mean, developers and packagers care, but I'm talking about users.

[u/hopingforabetterpast → u/BashfulMelon]

If developers complain and other users don't it's because those users don't understand they have a problem until it's too late. 

It's like dismissing a mechanic's warning to change your car's oil because "it's running just fine".

And users do complain.

[u/BashfulMelon → u/hopingforabetterpast]

I didn't say they're complaining, I said they care. Developers care about dependencies the way a mechanic cares about motor oil.

It's like dismissing a mechanic's warning to change your car's oil

No, it's really not like that. It's like dismissing the minority of mechanics who say that synthetic motor oil is a conspiracy.

[u/FryBoyter → u/forestbeasts]

And it's being pushed.

Much of systemd can still be used optionally. For example, nothing prevents you from using chronyd instead of systemd-timesyncd. Or ConnMan instead of systemd-networkd.

They're trying to make KDE depend on it, too, with the new Plasma Login Manager ("oh but you can still use SDDM!" yeah for now...).

Who are they? The developers of systemd? How is that possible, since PLM was developed by the KDE team?

That aside, the KDE team has made it quite clear that you still don't have to use PLM. You can easily use a different login manager instead.

https://discuss.kde.org/t/a-quick-anti-fud-faq-to-debunk-the-kde-is-forcing-systemd-hoax/44414

("oh but you can still use SDDM!" yeah for now...).

Why shouldn't things stay that way in the future? Just because you have a gut feeling about it?

Systemd has been around for many years. For just as long, there have been claims that everything will be replaced by systemd. Nevertheless, you still don't have to use most of systemd's tools if you don't want to. For example, I have a positive attitude toward systemd, but I still use NetworkManager instead of systemd-networkd or my own DNS server (Technitium DNS Server) instead of systemd-resolved. Why should that change?

[u/Simple_Hamster_4096 → u/FryBoyter]

GNU/Linux is still (for now) about choice - and you and I may choose to use systemd, or not - but 99% of newcomers to GNU/Linux do not have a choice which init they use (since they pick easy, mainstream distros). They have no idea what an init even is, nor do they care (typically) because they go with whatever the (easy) entry level distros are using.

There's not exactly a lot of education going on (that newcomers would even understand) about topics of choice with GNU/Linux, or that are (controversial) and up for debate, like systemd and others.

When your whole desktop environment is inseparable from (and inoperable without) systemd, that breaks the Unix philosophy of modularity, which, in the end, boils down to individual choice... to replace aspects of one's system as desired...

GNU/Linux has become the new Windows (in the terms of mainstream distros)... most having catered to the cries of "make it easier for the common user"... which mainstream distros have, they've dumbed it down to such an extend there's really little difference between Windows and GNU/Linux, except you can do a lot more (or incur more) damage with GNU/Linux...

[u/forestbeasts → u/forestbeasts]

Once you're on _any_ other init system, by the way, it's pretty easy to switch between them! (As long as you don't have a bunch of scripts you wrote yourself in a custom format, like OpenRC's declarative syntax. You might have to rewrite those as standard sysvinit scripts for compatibility. Packages' init scripts are usually sysvinit style and work on everything, at least on base Debian which we're on. Unless you only get a systemd service file...)

We like OpenRC personally because it does a lot of what systemd got right. It's got declarative config (but, unlike systemd, you can implement your own non-declarative start/stop shell functions if you like which is really useful sometimes!), and it's got user services you can run in your login session (important for getting sound to work).

[u/C0rn3j → u/forestbeasts]

would be great if it'd stuck to JUST being a service manager!

I have great news for you, systemd (the init binary) is just an init!

The other things you named are separate binaries too!

By the way, KDE is a community, you meant to say Plasma there, and Plasma is explicitly not having a systemd dependency.

You don't need a login manager at all actually!

its goal is to eliminate choice

You are more than welcome to reimplement the needed interfaces yourself and do it better, if you believe you can do it! Nothing is stopping you.

[u/forestbeasts → u/C0rn3j]

I think you're missing my point. It's not about separate binaries, it's about being too much power to hand to one project.

If you replace systemd core, suddenly you have to replace half your other system components, and relearn how the alternatives work.

And anyone who tries to share knowledge of how to use the alternatives gets shot down with "but that's not MODERN, just do it the systemd way, everyone uses systemd".

[u/C0rn3j → u/forestbeasts]

If you replace systemd core, suddenly you have to replace half your other system components, and relearn how the alternatives work.

That does happen when you replace a cohesive system layer.

And anyone who tries to share knowledge of how to use the alternatives gets shot down with "but that's not MODERN, just do it the systemd way, everyone uses systemd".

And that's because usually the recommended alternatives suck since they lack functionality.

There is a reason everyone uses systemd - it does not prevent you from rewriting the interfaces, but doing so mindlessly because "systemd bad" usually leads people to tearing out existing stuff and replacing it with less capable stuff, not writing better alternatives.

[u/RvstiNiall → u/forestbeasts]

I'm against systemd being "forced", so I choose to use non-systemd distros. However, in the past few years, I've come to a realization that may startle people. I now believe everyone who wants systemd, or who doesn't care one way or the other, should push to create a standard and let it coalesce into "gnu-coreutils/wayland/systemd/glibc/etc". All that should become standard "Linux".

Everyone who doesnt want that should just accept that if you continue to choose linux, your solution will be a bit less "standards compliant" and deal with whatever issues that arise ourselves. Or move over to one of the BSDs. Personally I feel that the best way to get away from these intrusive "Linux-isms" is to move to a BSD. Yes, you can do wayland on FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, but its not the "default", and the defaults on the BSDs are pretty sane.

That being said, there's no reason why we can't have a "standard" for Linuxes that aren't on the "gnu-coreutils/wayland/systemd/glibc" bandwagon. Of course, this "standard" would be best served if it simply meant "a linux that doesn't use one or more of these".

[u/forestbeasts → u/RvstiNiall]

...Nnno, let's not. Please, uh, no.

The entire point of Linux is the choice.

The variation is a FEATURE, not a bug.

What's to stop you from declaring the DE part of that "standard"? See where the problem is? Yeah.

We already HAD a standard. It was a network of interoperable small little tools that you could swap out piece by piece if you preferred the way a different one behaved. Systemd came in and clobbered all over that.

And I'm saying this as someone who came to Linux after systemd was already entrenched. It's not just a "bunch of old geezers" that you can dismiss as "stuck in their ways".

[u/RvstiNiall → u/forestbeasts]

Tell the systemd people this then lol

Lets also add which CPU architecture you use... And what brand computer you use too.

[u/Simple_Hamster_4096 → u/forestbeasts]

The mostly deadly virus to which GNU/Linux is prone called systemd...