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.

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
    162·
    10 months ago

    most people use whatever init system gets installed by their distro and, for the average user, interaction with the init system is pretty much non-existent (what interaction does exist is usually automated through the package manager)

    if you’re planning to go into devops, sysadmin, or backend, then learning the ins-and-outs of the init system for whatever is populating your containers is worthwhile (ex. OpenRC for Alpine Linux) but beyond that, it’s up to you where you want to spend your time

    • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.mlOP
      51·
      10 months ago

      Thank you, this answers some of my doubts but what about service compatibility across distros? Say, I want to use GNOME Shell or KDE. Since I’m assuming that they were made with systemd as the default, will this come with some learning cost, if I had to make it work on shepherd? And what will I lose from my switch to systemd, at least from a user perspective, if not from a package maintainers’?

      • cerement@slrpnk.net
        9·
        10 months ago
        • again, most of that is handled by the package maintainers for any particular distro (ex. for Guix, gnome-shell and plasma have already been taken care of)
        • a lot of packages don’t touch or even know about the init system
        • so the worries will only come into play for packages not in the chosen repository AND require systemd – and for distros not using systemd, they’ve probably already got a process in play for translating between systemd and whatever they’re using
      • 0x0@programming.dev
        1·
        10 months ago

        If you’re gonna use gnome you’re bound to systemd. Yes, gnome predates systemd. Strange…

        Don’t know about KDE.