I have been half-following some of the criticisms of systemd, the multi-purpose linux system manager. These criticisms range from technical complaints, to privacy concerns, to concerns over centralization. No doubt some of these are well founded, although some of the more febrile rants that can be found if you go looking are probably well over the top. But nonetheless, the breadth of the critiques, as well as my own mixed experiences setting up services on systemd, has led me to begin looking at alternatives.

The most obvious alternative is the BSD family of distributions, which have not implemented systemd. These are aimed at rather technical users (as if linux wasn’t nerd-focused enough!), and some of them don’t even ship with a graphical desktop environment. Not wanting to spend several hours just getting to a basic desktop, my first attempt was with GhostBSD, which is built on top of FreeBSD, but which helpfully includes a desktop environment.

So far this experiment has been a success. I have found some new-to-me tools, like fish shell and mate desktop, both of which appear to be good finds. But I expect to come across some rough edges going forward. The GhostBSD community is reputedly several orders of magnitude smaller than Ubuntu’s, for example, which means that many problems are likely not yet addressed, or at least they are less documented. This isn’t a problem until suddenly it is. It would probably be prudent of me to keep GhostBSD on hand as an experiment for a while, before I decide to rely on it for anything critical.

Lastly, I think it is good to diversify your tech. Getting too locked in to one ecosystem is a vulnerability. Even though the world of linux distributions is large, there is significant homogenization happening with tools like systemd. This isn’t inherently bad, but it is certainly a risk. Expanding to BSDs is a way to mitigate.