OpenSUSE is so good there are not many problems with it

openSUSE
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Truer words have never been spoken

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Hi @TrekJunky ,
Do you think OpenSUSE will move to a choice of init systems?

Debian seem to be moving, in that they now have runit available as a package. They dont support it very well yet but they have moved away from the systemd only approach.

I dont think we want to go back to sysVinit, but there should be a way forward to a simple modern init system.

Merry Christmas
Neville

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OpenSUSE is still trying to play in the big league with Red Hat and Oracle - I’d say there’s about Buckley’s, and Zero, chance of that happening…

I’m not 100% convinced of the viability of SystemD, and I kinda prefer the simplicity of init scripts - but - that horse has bolted, the gate’s wide open (and fallen off it’s rusted hinges)… SystemD is here to stay… I thought the same thing about 15 years ago when Sun started foisting SMF on us (it’s not that different to SystemD).

I hate having TOO many Linux distros in the mix in Enterprises, but now - we’re faced with penny pinching bean counting bureaucrats refusing to buy Red Hat Satellite (it’s actually not that expensive if you’re a big RHEL shop) - and now that SpaceWalk is deprecated/unmaintained - I have two customers who we’re now faced with instlalling a THIRD distro : OpenSUSE, to run Uyuni so we can have on-prem RPM / YUM repositories (or DNF as it’s now called - what an ominous acronym : what Did Not Finish?)…

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Well in that case OpenSUSE does have a problem … lack of vision

Yes, like the dinosaurs are still with us… as fossils.

Things are happening. It will be overtaken by a modern simple init system.
We will not go back to sysVinit.

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runit? what are the list of init systems available? Where can I get info on them? How are the scripts different than systemd’s scripts?

“Among those, the systemd is the most popular and modern one, which is used and adopted by all the modern Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora.”
from How to Find Systemd or Any Other init System in Linux

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You can easily tell if your system has runit… process #1 is called runit instead of init.
There is lots of info on runit here

There is wikipedia page on init systems

It includes a list of all systems, and there is some info on scripts and on the history of init systems.

My experience is that sysVinit scripts are rather complicated and are launched by sets of symbolic links called runlevels. There are six runlevels. The sysVinit links are in /etc/rc*.d and the scripts are in /etc/init.d

Runit scripts are simple. They too are launched by links but there is only one set of links and there are only 3 runlevels called start, run, and stop. Runit’s links are usually in /etc/service and its scripts are in /etc/sv

I do not know how systemd does it. Does it use a link farm?

I dont think we have heard the last word on init systems yet.
They will continue to evolve, until we get it right.
What OpenSUSE does next will be a good pointer to the future
direction. They are more levelheaded than Debian.