I’m planning to move over to Guix over NixOS, as soon as my current situation improves and possibly import a new libre respecting laptop (Star Labs is thankfully available in India). I do have a very old laptop with a Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM with Guix installed already, and what has come to my attention is that it uses shepherd.

I’m not actually against or for systemd, in fact, I am not really sure why I should even care - maybe it is because I’m still not on to the level of a power user. Since I’m starting to learn kernel basics to prepare for GNU/Hurd contributions in the nearest possible future and shepherd seems to be what the GNU folks will be using, is there any reason why I should even care about the freedom of init system?

Edit: I’m asking this because I came across this blog - What is systemd and Why Should I Care? and also because Guix uses shepherd, and I’m not sure how I’ll be affected.

    • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      8 months ago

      I’m pretty sure dinit, s6 and runit are faster than systemd (in that order), but it probably depends a bit on your setup. It has better boottime than some others, tho

    • Adanisi@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      8 months ago

      Sysvinit might be slower, I’m not sure, but runit is definitely faster.

          • alt@lemmy.ml
            1·
            8 months ago

            Ow wow, that’s a lot! Unsure to what degree you’ve used them; but if you feel confident talking about (at least some of) them, would you be so kind to offer us a rundown of what you liked and didn’t like? Thanks in advance!

            • ar0177417@lemmy.world
              2·
              8 months ago

              I just have a super crappy laptop with a hdd. So speed difference is quite noticeable. On systemd, boot times were greater than 2 min (done everything I could in systemd-analyze). So, I switched to Dinit which is new and quite barebones also a tad bit unstable (sometimes crashed for me). It allowed under 30 sec boot times. Then, I tested all init managers. Currently, on runit which is about 2-3sec slower than dinit but otherwise quite stable. I just choosed based on speed nothing else. I didn’t notice much difference in functionality. All allowed me to do all the things I wanted just in a different way. Artix linux allows easy switching of init managers