[CentOS] Just need to vent

Sun Jan 24 23:40:33 UTC 2016
Peter Duffy <peter at pwduffy.org.uk>

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.)