On Sun, 2016-01-24 at 12:01 -0600, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
Well, there is Linux distribution which is systemd-free. And that distribution I predict will live for decently long time. It is "Devuan" - a fork of Debian, stripped off systemd and friends... well, I should have said: composed without systemd and friends. Devuan was forked off ebian because of systemd. Once Ubuntu was mentioned, which is a replica of Debian (the last _is_ systemd...), then Devuan should be pretty close to yours Ubuntu experience. You, however, may also be tired of often reboots (which all Linuxes in my observation suffer from: every on average 45 days there is either kernel or glibc security update requiring reboot... no, I do know that ksplice and similar exist, but there are few things I will not do on servers). If that is the case you may look around and find some UNIX system to use for some of your boxes (Open Solaris, BSD derivatives like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD come first to my mind). Search, try, and something will fill the bill. Number Crunchers, clusters, even workstations I set up for my users are still staying Linux, CentOS to be precise, even though servers are migrated away.
My problem is that Debian and all its derivatives use apt/dpkg for packaging, updating and installing, while Red Hat and derivatives use rpm/yum. I have much experience with the latter, and have frequently set up local installation repositories; I'm a lot less familiar with the apt/dpkg world (although I got a crash course in it when I had to set up an apt local installation repository early last year, and it wasn't pleasant!) As far as I know, there isn't an rpm-based distro which is systemd-free.
The thing which always gets me about systemd is not the thing itself, but the way it was rolled out. When I first installed Red Hat 7, if a window had appeared telling me about systemd and asking me if I wanted to use it, or stick with the old init framework, I'd have opted for the latter (as I was interested primarily in continuity from the previous version.) But I'd have noted the existence of systemd, and would have tried it out on a sacrificial box - I might even have got to like it! But having it rammed down my throat just put me off it for life (bit like a kid being force-fed Brussels sprouts.)