If you have to ask, no.

I say this as someone who doesn’t use systemd. There’s not much benefit to it. It’s cool to do if you’re an enthusiast or experimentalist, but from a practical stand point, systemd is most practical.

I use gentoo with openRC btw.

Short answer: if you’re asking this, then it’s not worth it.

Long answer: Ditching systemd in favor of something else is usually an act of experimentation. Folks that do it usually have had a negative experience with systemd, be it in its usage or from a problem they had that prevented them to boot their computers due to the tightly-coupled relationship between mainstream distros and systemd.

Also, preference is involved here, so you might prefer to assemble your system with independent pieces instead of a full-blown suite like systemd’s. You might also not like systemd’s UX so, as a user, you end up wanting to try something else.

I mean, is systemd giving YOU problems? If not, don’t switch just because other people complain about it

The complaints are just a meme at this point. If you have to ask, don’t bother.

If you have to ask, the benefits of another init system than systemd starts and stops at “you look smart.” I like runit a lot and would even recommend Void Linux as a daily driver if that’s your speed, but honestly anyone who actually was around before systemd knew how much sysvinit and co sucked.

Even you asking this question means you should not. Systemd is perfectly fine for most people and the people that dislike it have their very specific reasons. Just use what your distro gives you, you shouldn’t have to care about these things.

Keep systemd. People can cry all they like but it’s the best init system we have right now. Unless you want to start building a better one, i guess.

the only reason to stick to one of those init systems is that you already know everything about them and you dont want to relearn a bunch of stuff.

other than that i see 0 benefits to skip systemd

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Systemd is a large piece of software. There are ways to make it smaller and disable various modules for it, but usually by default it’s very heavy.

With a traditional init system, it’s just an init system, and you’ll use other other programs to do the other things. This basically means a chain of interconnected bash scripts. Perhaps you’ll run into some integration issues. Probably not though. It’ll be mostly the same.

There is no real advantage to this from a user perspective beyond a philosophical one. Systemd works quite well at doing the things it tries to do, but it’s the Unix philosophy to “do one thing and do it well,” and some people care very deeply that systemd does not follow their interpretation of that philosophy, and that’s certainly a fair reason to not use it.

However, if you’re not having problems with using systemd, I’d say don’t bother switching.

Is the experience of trying new distros very cool? yes

Should you abandon systemd? no

systemd is not bloated and it’s not insecure. If you don’t have any problems, don’t switch (unless you wanna have some fun trying new things, if you do, run a vm).

As someone who’ve tried Gentoo on systemd and OpenRC, as well as Void with runit, I don’t see any reason to use OpenRC over systemd. I never noticed any performance difference, and it has far less features. As for runit, if half the boot time for half the features is what you need, then go for it.

just another one of the holy wars within Linux – for the average user, it’s not going to make any difference – most of the mainstream distros switched over a LONG time ago so if you want to avoid systemd, you have to do a little hunting (ex. Devuan, Void, Gentoo, etc.)

Switch to sysvinit and you’ll understand the benefit of systemd

My understanding is that systemd goes against traditional unix philosophy, but that from an end users perspective it will generally be a much better experience.

I’ve heard some init systems are maybe faster, but it’s a very minor improvement if true and you’re giving up a lot of features for it.