After four years of using systemd, the Debian-based Knoppix distribution removed the controversial init system.
This Sunday (August 18 *) version 8.6 of the popular Linux distribution Knoppix based on Debian has been released. The release is based on Debian 9(Buster), released on July 10th, with a number of packages from the testing and unstable branches to provide support for new video cards. Knoppix is ββone of the first live-CD Linux distributions and is still very popular among enthusiasts to this day.
The release of Knoppix 8.6 is the first public version of the distribution to drop systemd, an init system developed by Red Hat's Lennart PΓΆttering to replace sysvinit. While the adaptation of systemd has been the subject of controversy and criticism, systemd is currently the default choice in the mainstream. Used in Knoppix - Debian upstream; RHEL, CentOS and Fedora openSUSE and SLES, as well as Mageia and Arch.
Dissatisfaction with systemd is mainly due to the redundancy of functions that the subsystem takes on, as the project does not correspond to the main Unix philosophy of "do one task, and do it well." Other aspects, such as logs in binary form (as opposed to human-readable text-based logs) are also subject to criticism.
Technically, the first version of Knoppix to remove systemd was 8.5; but this version was distributed exclusively with the print versions of Linux Magazine Germany earlier this year and was not available for public download. Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper wrote briefly about the decision to remove systemd in this version (translated from German, links added for context):
βThe still controversial systemd startup that only recently sparked outrage over security vulnerabilities, has been integrated into Debian since version 8.0 (Jessie), and has been removed since the release of Knoppix 8.5. I bypassed the hard dependencies with the boot system with my own packages (amendments *).
To keep systemd-like session management, and thus preserve the ability to shutdown and restart the system as a normal user, I used the elogind session manager. This avoided systemd interfering with many system components and reduced the complexity of the system as a whole. If you need to run your own services at startup, you don't need to create any systemd units, just write your services in the text file /etc/rc.local which contains examples and explanations.
Knoppix used systemd from 2014 to 2019, becoming the second in a very short list of distributions that integrated and then abandoned systemd - Void Linux is the first on this list. Also in 2016, a fork of Debian - Devuan was created, created around the systemd-free philosophy. (There is a similar fork of Arch Linux - Artix, using openRC. *)
Knoppix also comes with a system for people with disabilities, ADRIANE (Audio Desktop Reference Implementation And Networking Environment), which is a "talking menu system that aims to make it easier for computer novice users to work and access the Internet, even if they don't have visual contact with the computer screen," optionally includes a Compiz-based screen magnifier system.
* - approx. translator
Source: linux.org.ru