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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

You can turn the situation around: Pick some non-systemd OS, stick to it, and avoid software that does not run on it. You will end up with the old and boring tech, but it will be robust and run more reliable in the long term.

I've been running Alpine Linux in production for 4 years now.

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You will end up with the old and boring tech

Not always. I have sway and pipewire running smooth as can be on my systemd-free workstation. As well as recent releases of Linux, glibc, Mesa, and Firefox. All the essentials are there and up to date for me!

That's true.

I am using Gentoo with no systemd and with the latest versions of all programs that I am interested in.

Unfortunately systemd & glibc (or even macOS) are usually the more pragmatic choice. I'd love to have the freedom to ignore them, but even outside of work, there is software (like games) that I want to run that doesn't play nice with anything more sane.

The glibc 2.26 breakages (including the ucontext thing) were what made me stick to musl/Alpine. This was in 2017, around the same time poettering did the "i don't consider this much of a problem"-things on github.

Note that musl libc in Alpine Linux has significantly smaller default thread stack size than glibc (128 kB vs 8 MB), therefore software developed and tested with glibc can easily crash with stack overflow.

Alpine's great. My entire homelab runs on it. Only complaint I have is its IPv6 support sucks. I have to hack together a bunch of scripts to get a reasonable network configuration.

I had no trouble with IPv6. For static config i add it to /etc/network/interfaces, for dynamic config i use dhcpcd without issues.

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