Systemd, also know as soystemd or shitstemd, is a program that supposed to be a PID 1 (or init system) process which is the first userspace process the kernel starts, but it has become a monolithic mess. Lennart Poettering created soystemd. It is not only just an init system but also contains a bootloader, it has it's own version of programs like sudo or doas that temporarily elevate privileges for users, it has udev built into it which handles devices built connect to your computer, it can manage networking, and it also manages each users login sessions with elogind. Parts of systemd like udev, elogind, and systemd's boot loader can be seperated into their own seperate programs seperate from the systemd init or systemd's software suit. Systemd also has plenty of security issues. When compare to runit, runit has only had two cves and dinit which has zero cves. Systemd falls back to Google's DNS servers. And systemd is now adding age verification to their init. The biggest issue with systemd is that almost every GNU/Linux distro relies on systemd and many distros do not provide any alternatives to it. If you want to avoid systemd (which you should) use something like Artix, Devuan, Void, Slackware, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc.
The entire Gnome desktop environment relies on systemd and some KDE applications like plasma login manager (KDE's fork of sddm) can only be used on systemd systems (you can use sddm instead if you are on a systemd free distro or on BSD).
Dinit is a good alternative to Systemd. It is similar to systemd in syntax with enabling and disabling services, has dependency handling unlike runit, and can manage user services unlike runit. It is not a bloated monolith like systemd and it blazingly fast on startup and when powering off computer. It has around ~25,000 lines of code unlike systemd which is over 1 million lines of code. Runit is more simple than dinit but has less features.
No Rights Reserved. Powered by nothing. All content available under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Send comments and corrections to ronin at basedronin0@proton.me.