What are the most active distros without systemd?
Ever since systemd was adopted by mainstream distros, there's been many reactive projects aiming to provide a distro without systemd.
I've often had the impression that a lot of these were motivated by opposition to systemd to get off the ground, but then languished because the maintainers found it difficult to follow through on the less controversial, "boring" aspects of actually maintaining a distro long term.
I don't like systemd and I would like to use a distro that doesn't depend on it. But I also have limited appetite for tinkering. It would be annoying to switch to a distro without the systemd, only to be stuck with a bunch of other things broken that would be quickly fixed in any active distro.
I realize that tinkering and troubleshooting comes with the territory on Linux, even the big distros like Ubuntu or Mint. But with some niche distros it's a whole other level. There's ones where the maintainers are few, but they are disciplined at staying on top of maintenance, I'm not worried about those. But then there's the ones where the maintainers are so on and off that you see urgent, critical issues go for months without even a word from any maintainer - those aren't practical to use unless you can commit to a level of effort equivalent to being a distro maintainer yourself.
If I am looking for a systemd-free distro in 2024, that minimizes such issues, what are my options?
2 answers
Devuan GNU+Linux is still around. It's boring, just like the Debian it's based on, because it's without the added drama of systemd and whatever systemd has supplanted. That will become a bigger problem over time however, for whenever Debian gets rid of sudo, for example.
You have your choice of the unstable Sid equivalent, named Ceres, or any of the major version number releases which have silly names just like Debian has! Pick which year's equivalent software you want to run, and find the version released that year.
I understand MX Linux is still around and offers a non-systemd option.
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I can't answer this question fully, but I'll try my best.
A reasonably comprehensive list of non-systemd distros can be found at https://nosystemd.org/. There might be some which are not on that list, but if they're not on that list they're probably not very active, so it doesn't matter in this case.
"Activity" is nebulous. The theme of my answer will be to try and pick some quantitative metrics that are easy to obtain, and seem like they're relevant. I encourage everyone to edit and expand this answer like a wiki. This does not really answer the questions, but hopefully it is useful.
- AntiX: 536 hits, ? stars, ?/? bugs
- Alpine: 290 hits, 1k stars, 167/366
- PCLinuxOS: 283 hits, ? stars, ?/? bugs
- Devuan: 237 hits, ? stars, ?/? bugs
- They use their own Git host at https://git.devuan.org/
- There's definitely bugs tracked at https://bugs.devuan.org/ but I couldn't count them
- Slackware: 224 hits, ? stars, ?/? bugs
- Slackware has no bug tracker, and relies on the forum at linuxquestions.org, which is quite active
- Gentoo: 175 hits, 2k stars, 10k+ / 10k+ bugs
- They have their own tracker on https://bugs.gentoo.org/ and search returns at most 10k - probably a lot more are filed
- Tiny Core: 150 hits, 215 stars, 5/5 bugs
- Artix: 136 hits, ? stars, ?/? bugs.
- Their source code is at https://gitea.artixlinux.org/
- Void: 127 hits, 2.4k stars, 4077/4839 bugs.
- Many BSDs
Methodology: For hits, I used HPD from distrowatch. This may become slightly out of date, but I doubt distros often "go viral", so it shouldn't be too off even so. I ordered by hits for simplicity's sake. For "stars", I tried to find the most active repo. Sometimes this is a less important repo like documentation or a small package, but I figure it's a fair indicator of how many people are "involved" in development. Notably, the more enterprising distros tend to have their own source hosting, where the stars are used little or not at all compared to Github. For bugs, I tried to look for the most active bug tracker, but it's not always easy to find. It's intended as a very rough heuristic.
Some of these have skewed "activity" - for example, Alpine is used heavily for Docker containers, which might not be as interesting for this question.
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