Hi, I wanted to try Debian but i found out that its foundation relies heavily on systemd. I’m using a Lenovo Ideapad 500-15isk that’s why I want to be away from systemd’s bloat, I’m still not an advanced user but i had Ubuntu + KDE for 2 Years (GUI only) then used CachyOS + Hyprland(Caelestia shell) for 1.5 years ( Used Terminal more than GUI). This time I want to make the OS usage as low as possible but also not old/ugly. Thank you in advance.
I’m not sure how much of a difference it would make in terms of resource usages to ditch systemd, but what i can say is that Void is a great distro. Runit boots blazingly fast, xbps is probably no joke the fastest package manager i’ve ever used, but also very robust and can handle very outdated systems just fine. I’ve never tried Devuan so i don’t have an opinion on it.
I use AntiX (core) with runit, and it’s basically just an opinionated Debian with less systemd bloat (and extra packages from MXLinux repo). It works swimmingly on my laptop with an i3-4030U Lenovo Flex 2 (although I did upgrade to 16 GB of memory). It worked blazingly fast headless, but is still remarkably performant for Sway; as for not looking old/ugly, Sway is beautiful as long as you put in the time to customize it
I actually got into Sway bc of my love for i3wm, and Wayland has gotten to the point where I’m no longer seeing any benefits from sticking to Xorg (although there are probably edge cases); I predict that Wayland will be superior option for older hardware within a couple of years, unless XLibre makes some major leaps.
are screensharing and remote desktop on wayland still horrible? my experience last year ether does not work or keep asking for permission that I cannot allow all the time.
I get where y9u’re coming from, screen-sharing used to be a massive pain point for me. I regularly host movie nights thru discord on my Debian + GNOME pc. I haven’t switched off Wayland in a few months on that one. Besides the occasional audio issue, which gets resolved by unsharing and then sharing the window again, I haven’t had issues.
Idk about remote desktop. On the same PC, I used to use Remmina to access my work (windows) PC, starting about 2.5 years ago; the only problem I had back then was that I had to run Remmina as root for the multi-monitor support to work correctly (which could be done as a regular user in Xorg). All this to say that remote desktop hasn’t ever really been FUBAR for me, and I haven’t tried it in about a year. On the other hand, the “you’ve gotta be root” was a deal-breaker, and even back then I only tested it in one direction (never tried accessing my Debian pc via RDP).
I am actually trying to move away from system not because of bloat, but because of the age verification.
Not sure if they will keep pushing it after it is clear that linux have been excampted from new laws, I am currently just waiting and see
Actually from what I know they just added a date of birth option, it is not an age verification.
Systemd: hate it for what it is and how it’s built, and continue hating it for its capitulation to intrusive surveillance.
Does i3 do wayland?
If you want system usages to be as low as possible you can skip a GUI all together, just use viu, mpv, w3m and such or you can look into projects like DSL (damn small Linux) and puppy Linux. If you’re trying to maintain a mostly normal experience you can look into efficiencies in compiling your kernel and software a la Gentoo.
I doubt Debian requires systemd in order to work. However I do not see what your problem is with systemd, do you have an example of problems caused by the bloat?
It is very light on the system and a much better way to handle services that the old init scripts. If you want to reduce system resources usage I’d look somewhere else. You are likely to save a few MB of ram and some cycles of your cpu by removing systemd, but I doubt any significant amount.
Dwm or dwl
St or havoc with tmux for your terminal. Should be able to get under 8MB in usage.
