I’m planning to move over to Guix over NixOS, as soon as my current situation improves and possibly import a new libre respecting laptop (Star Labs is thankfully available in India). I do have a very old laptop with a Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM with Guix installed already, and what has come to my attention is that it uses shepherd.
I’m not actually against or for systemd, in fact, I am not really sure why I should even care - maybe it is because I’m still not on to the level of a power user. Since I’m starting to learn kernel basics to prepare for GNU/Hurd contributions in the nearest possible future and shepherd seems to be what the GNU folks will be using, is there any reason why I should even care about the freedom of init system?
most people use whatever init system gets installed by their distro and, for the average user, interaction with the init system is pretty much non-existent (what interaction does exist is usually automated through the package manager)
if you’re planning to go into devops, sysadmin, or backend, then learning the ins-and-outs of the init system for whatever is populating your containers is worthwhile (ex. OpenRC for Alpine Linux) but beyond that, it’s up to you where you want to spend your time
Thank you, this answers some of my doubts but what about service compatibility across distros? Say, I want to use GNOME Shell or KDE. Since I’m assuming that they were made with
systemdas the default, will this come with some learning cost, if I had to make it work onshepherd? And what will I lose from my switch tosystemd, at least from a user perspective, if not from a package maintainers’?