Hello, On Tue, 2025-09-09 at 08:02 -0600, Stan Johnson wrote: > Thanks, that's good information. The reason I kept systemd for these > tests in Debian is that an increasing number of Debian packages are > being compiled to require systemd. For example, as far as I know, Xfce > is the last desktop environment (other than twm) that doesn't require > systemd in Debian. Even the lightdm display manager seems to require > systemd, though it appears that wdm and xdm do not. I wanted to confirm > that X11 still breaks on the Wallstreet even when systemd is being used.
I'm pretty sure lightdm depends on logind, but not systemd but I could be wrong. Did you try installing elogind as a replacement? > Anyway, systemd is great for large systems with gigabytes of memory, but > not so much for small systems that are memory-constrained (such as m68k > and most powerpc, certainly all m68 and G3/G4 PowerBooks). I've used > systemd successfully on a two-processor PowerMac G5 with 8 GiB memory, > but even there sysvinit is noticeably faster. systemd can run very well on memory-constrained systems if you take the time to configure it. It enables a lot of services and features by default that you can just disable. > Not being an expert in systemd, I wish there were some tools to convert > systemd services to sysvinit scripts (perhaps there are and I just don't > know about them). I don't think this is reasonably possible except for very simple service files. The problem is that SysVInit uses bash scripts while systemd uses a declarative format which doesn't contain any executable code. > Anyway, I'll keep using Debian distributions as long as they offer a > choice of init programs. Gentoo is also a good option, though X11 there > is more of a hassle to set up. I got it working in Gentoo by using twm; > performance is mostly comparable to modern systems, except for the > limited features of twm. > > I would also add that it's a good idea for every system to have a rescue > partition (I use Debian and Gentoo, so they can rescue each other if > needed). And a working copy of dump/restore to copy filesystems between > systems is helpful. Yes, I know there are issues using the same SSH > setup on multiple systems, but I've mostly given up on SSH anyway at > this point, especially on old hardware. Not only is it slow, but the SSH > developers keep making new versions incompatible with old versions. So I > mostly use telnet and ftp. Of course, cleartext passwords are a bad idea > and shouldn't be used on any Internet-facing systems. You should be able to enable old ciphers and algorithms on the SSH command line to be able to connect to a server using an older version of the SSH server. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
