My difficult love for systemd and RedHat

17 Jan 2025

The introduction

I have always liked systemd. I liked that it allows you to manage your Linux system in a simple, centralized way. I was laughing at people who didn't like it and called them old men. Once, I even wrote to Lennart Poettering that I love him. I used to use KDE mainly, and I have switched to GNOME about two or three years ago. I am currently using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE on my desktop and Fedora Workstation with GNOME on my laptop.

The beginning of my problems

Sometimes it annoyed me that my laptop took like 3-5 minutes to power off. The system showed that it took that long because of systemd waiting for NetworkManager to stop. I finally understood what it was about people who hate systemd.

My awakening

At the end of last year, I wanted to get a cheap VPS for hosting small websites and making a VPN tunnel for remote access to my home network. On December 30, 2024, I bought the mikr.us Frog VPS with 256 MB of RAM and 3 GB of disk space. It cost me only 5 Polish zlotys, this is what a can of Coca-Cola costs at a gas station. This VPS runs Alpine Linux in a Linux container (LXC). I have used Alpine Linux before, but only for a test on a virtual machine on my computer. I didn't do anything with it, but I liked how fast it booted, and it took little resources, even on KVM. With 1 GB of RAM and 1 core of Intel Core i3 9100, I could run XFCE with Firefox and browse Facebook. It was not very fast, but it worked. I also liked the Alpine package manager, APK. It was blazing fast and resolved dependencies correctly.

I am now thinking about switching the OS on my desktop and laptop to Void Linux, because Alpine doesn't have glibc, which can make it incompatible with some software. Void is a rolling release, but it is pretty reliable.

What will probably happen in the near future?

If I go crazy, I'll use a window manager with my own configuration instead of some ready-made desktop environment. If I go totally crazy, I might even use Gentoo, CRUX, KISS Linux or some BSD derivative.

Thank you very much @czerwiec@mastodon.com.pl