Anyone following or using Linux has noticed that the systemd init system has been pushed into more and more distributions. Most of the popular distributions have switched to it and offer little choice of using anything else. It was originally developed by a redhat employee and first appeared in fedora several years ago. I have used distros that are based on systemd and it seems to work fine and does provide a faster startup. The concern is that by standardizing the init system it allows Linux to become less fragmented (which could be good, but) and thereby easier to monitor. I remember seeing a video analysis of the systemd documentation a couple years ago where in one area the developer had a comment "this was added to keep the 3-letter agencies happy". The guys doing the analysis only said.. not sure what he means by that but it might be a good idea to stay far away from this. This along with the fact that systemd is not too unix like (do one thing and do it well is the unix motto) has created some push back in the linux community and therefore this wiki page was created:
without-systemd.org
I have tried several of the distros listed on the wiki and there are two that really stand out as being more stable and tested.
manjaro-openrc and devuan.org
I originally favored manjaro because its based on Arch linux which is my favorite distribution. However because it uses the Arch repos and the Arch Users Repository (AUR), i noticed that some programs wanted to install systemd back in as a dependency, which defeats its purpose.
After another run with Slackware i settled on Devuan as my distro of choice. Seems to work well, based on Debian but without systemd. Haven't noticed any negative effects yet, and have installed quite a lot of software. I did have to change to the testing repos instead of stable because the network driver and nvidia driver were too old in the stable repositories for my hardware.
Combine Devuan with i3 Window Manager and you end up with a pretty sweet fast OS that hopefully isn't full of spyware :}
UPDATE: After a few weeks on Devuan, I was disappointed that the distro is not updated regularly. Some of the software is quite old. Decided to go with a more bleeding edge distro Void Linux that uses runit for the init system. Install went well and all the packages I needed were available. Might keep this one for awhile :}
