MX Linux of course

Guix

It's either Slackware (Linux, no systemd), OpenBSD or NetBSD.

True story: I install a Red Hat server with a disk shelf with about 12 SAS disk in it. Red Hat has systemd. Everything works fine for a month.

One (1) disk out of the 12 fails. No biggie. Shutdown the server cleanly. Replace disk. Flip power back on. Rebuild disk config. Simple, right?

Wrong. You see, systemd is unhappy. It detects a new disk. It has lost a previous disk. And so, it refuses to boot. Period.

Yes, there are ways out of this. But that was the day I decided systemd was the down of the devil.

Open or Free BSD.

Artix has the most amount of alternative init systems available.

I would recommend Devuan, but it just wraps SysV in runit as a service manager rather than just using runit as init.

Gentoo has options for systemd or openrc. You can get runit or s6 to work on it if you're pretty familiar with how /sbin/init works,or so I've ascertained from researching, but have not done this yet.

Void is very interesting as it uses runit and also uses musl instead of glibc. I don't think it has quite as many packages as Artix though due to lack of AUR, and I can only estimate that the use of musl instead of glibc necessitates the need for some interesting workarounds from time to time.

I use Artix with runit. Have been daily driving this for around 6 years now and have been very happy with it.

If I were to use anything else I'd go through the trouble of installing Gentoo and configure it to use s6 init. Just to get more granular control.

Alpine. No GNU and systemD.

Totally Guix, it has no systemd and is able to roll back to the last working in case you break anything somehow

There are few system manager (single project or a mix of components) that use linux features efficiently and none have dev resource remotely comparable to systemd. That's why in practice systemd is the best system layer implementation on gnu/linux. Android and chromeos userland (upstart derived) are not exactly (freedesktop) gnu/linux.

EDIT: the post ask which OS though. Including userland I like android a lot, but I would say illumos distros (OI currently). illumos has a system management similar to systemd (contracts in place of cgroups for example). Actually systemd was heavily inspired by SMF too.

My favorite is Debian, with systemd uninstalled. At this point, you can't install Debian without systemd, but you can uninstall systemd after OS installation.

It used to be that most desktop environments in Debian depended on libpam-systemd, which depended on systemd and systemd-sysv. More recently, desktop environments just depend on libpam-elogind and elogind which is only part of systemd, and allows you to use sysvinit.

I prefer sysvinit mainly because I find it easier to create custom services out of my own programs. My success rate at doing this in systemd is 1/3, and in sysvinit about 10/10.

I also had a problem where a Debian-based embedded system had some kind of broken NTP client running on startup, and due to systemd, I couldn't figure out how to disable it. It would set the time to several years into the future, as soon as it first got a network connection on each startup.

I personally think AROS ( AROS Research Operating Syste ) is pretty cool. Same with just the basic Amiga Workbench 3 series ( the only one I have any experience with ).

Obviously Amiga Workbench isn't daily driver ready, but neither is AROS since it's, from what I can tell, just an Amiga OS passion project trying to make a more modern more open source Amiga OS.

OS/2

Alpine

What's SystemD and what is it bad?

In terms of desktop operating systems, my first choices are usually Chimera Linux or FreeBSD.

GrapheneOS, I assume

GrapheneOS for Google Pixels, LineageOS for any other phone.

Lot's of Systemd apologists, barely one answer to the question.

cat propaganda

FreeBSD.

And you can run Linux stuff just fine.

🤔Windows 🤣

OS400 (IBM i)