The team behind the leading replacement OS for end-of-life smartphones are to adopt systemd - to make working with GNOME and KDE easier.

The official postmarketOS blog announced that systemd is coming to postmarketOS. There are solid technical reasons. The announcement explains:

The Reg asked the project's own Oliver Smith about the reasons for the move. He told us:

Alpine Linux contributor Ariadne Conill enlarged upon this point on her Fediverse instance:

The discussion is worth a read, and reinforces our impression that many of the Linux projects seeking to avoid systemd do so by retaining simpler, 20th-century style init systems, often driven by lots of interlinked shell scripts. This works, but it's not adequate for modern requirements - nor easy to maintain.

Another demonstration is that what's left of the commercial Unix world moved away from script-based init systems nearly 20 years ago: Solaris 10 switched to smf in 2005, the same year that Apple released Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" with launchd. This is one reason that we are watching the progress of the GNU-free Chimera Linux project with considerable interest.

We talked about postmarketOS back in 2022. The basic idea is to bring older smartphones back to life, after they're no longer supported with updates from their manufacturers, by running a standard Linux OS on them. On the face of it, this is a good idea.

PostmarketOS itself is based on Alpine Linux, which we looked at in 2022, and came away impressed. Alpine Linux avoids two elements used by most more mainstream Linux distros: it doesn't use the standard GNU libc, replacing it with the smaller, lighter musl libc. For some, that's a problem, because for years, musl only supported DNS over UDP: it didn't support DNS over TCP, which broke some applications. However, that issue was fixed last year, as we explained when looking at Alpine 3.18.

Alpine also features on nosystemd.org because it doesn't use Agent P's universally-loved system management daemon; instead, as Conill mentions, it uses OpenRC. As such, we particularly enjoyed this question in the postmarketOS announcement:

Perhaps it is just us, but that does not strike us as a resounding "yes," and we don't foresee Alpine changing similarly any time soon. ®

Bootnote

For context, we thought that this assessment, systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer, offers interesting perspective. The author is one of the core maintainers of Adélie Linux, a separate distribution from Alpine, although it uses some of the same components: musl libc, OpenRC, and the APK packaging tool.

https://www.theregister.com//2024/03/11/postmarketos_goes_systemd/