More and more everything is becoming dependent on Linux, SystemD and it's related libraries (at least in open source), which contributes to a potential (if not already evident) corporate mono-culture. If steps towards decentralization are not taken now, it could be harder to step away in the future.

How many distros are truly free of SystemD, GLIBC and OpenSSL? Maybe 5 or less, 10 if you want to count other OSs like OpenBSD. Even LFS has now gone the way of SystemD.

Off the top of my head:

- Dragora

- Adelie

- KISS / Wyverkiss

- Oasis

Anything else is non-linux or is only partial.

Partial:

- Artix

- Devuan

- Gentoo

- Void

- Slackware

Non-Linux:

- All the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD)

- Illumos / OpenIndiana / DilOS etc

- plan9/9front

- Haiku

- ArcaOS / eComStation

- AROS/MorphOS/AmigaOS

- Genode (?)

- TempleOS / Shrine / Tinker / Zenith

- Bluebottle or whatever it's called

- FreeMiNT / Atari whatever stuff idk if this counts

- Anything else

What about GUI toolkits? GTK4 and QT are becoming much more tightly integrated (if not outright dependent) on SystemD.

Here's a non-comprehensive list of alternative GUI toolkits:

STLWRT (gtk2 fork)

tqt3 (qt3 fork, Trinity project)

https://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/ - GUI library focusing on just the GUI and not being a framework. Uses Motif or GTK+ 2 or 3 on Unix. On Windows it uses native functions. And mac too iirc.

http://libagar.org/ - SDL/OpenGL/X11 GUI library.

https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear - Immediate mode UI in ANSI C.

Also I wanted to talk about this Lemmy thread, and the main part of the Wayland argument going on. It primarily trashes wlroots in favor of this "swc" library that can't do basic stuff, so neuswc is proposed. Apparently the only thing viable written in it is by the same author, this thing called Velox. In the example config it launches st and dmenu by default. Are these not well known Xorg programs? DWL is much more feature complete in this respect, but it uses the evil wlroots that's apparently bad. Maybe someone can share some more experiences about this. Why not use the foot terminal (not the GNOME one)?

(writing this in a vi session in w3m, so this post might look shit)

When I'm not using OpenBSD, the other thing (for vidya and non-minimalist browsing) I use is Alpine Linux, which checks two of the boxes there aside from OpenSSL. I'm not a particular fan of the distro wild west culture of Linux, Alpine just seemed like the smaller and more BSD-like option for me. I also ran across Glosnost and Chimera looking at the non-partial distros.

I think BSD is the only (or at least the most) reasonable alternative if one were to flee SystemD/Linux entirely, since there are other notable signs of corporate control in Linux, and the fact that the other alternative OS' aren't exactly compelling enough for the averagely informed user, aside from lack of software.

- Solaris and its forks don't particularly seem much different from OpenBSD's usecases. - Plan9 is weird, personally. I'm not particularly a fan of forced GUI and mouse usage, for a so-called simple operating system, that's 'more unix than unix'. Also, 9front has a horrible stench coming from what it parades on its front page. - I like Haiku's commitment to staying as a desktop OS, I'd say it's the more reasonable non-UNIX pick, even if it's still in a beta stage. - TempleOS is awesome in its concepts and rather fun, very niche but forks are trying to change that.

shadow

More and more everything is becoming dependent on Linux, SystemD and it's related libraries (at least in open source), which contributes to a potential (if not already evident) corporate mono-culture. If steps towards decentralization are not taken now, it could be harder to step away in the future.

This is a statement constantly being put on, but how come this be the case? The reason for "decentralisation" has been more or less because nobody was taking the time to replace systemd, udev, dbus, logind and so on. The alternatives are more or less a downgrade or a fork that runs independently from systemd.

shadow

How many distros are truly free of SystemD, GLIBC and OpenSSL? Maybe 5 or less, 10 if you want to count other OSs like OpenBSD. Even LFS has now gone the way of SystemD.

Off the top of my head:

- Dragora

- Adelie

- KISS / Wyverkiss

- Oasis

Anything else is non-linux or is only partial.

Partial:

- Artix

- Devuan

- Gentoo

- Void

- Slackware

Non-Linux:

- All the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD)

- Illumos / OpenIndiana / DilOS etc

- plan9/9front

- Haiku

- ArcaOS / eComStation

- AROS/MorphOS/AmigaOS

- Genode (?)

- TempleOS / Shrine / Tinker / Zenith

- Bluebottle or whatever it's called

- FreeMiNT / Atari whatever stuff idk if this counts

- Anything else

I personally use Void Linux. You can use Void Linux musl quite nicely from what I know (although, Chromium and Electron-based applications may not work as well). The developers are not interested in the crusades against systemd, which is why udev, elogind, and even systemd-boot are available. You can, however, use Void Linux without elogind.

shadow

What about GUI toolkits? GTK4 and QT are becoming much more tightly integrated (if not outright dependent) on SystemD.

Where is that statement coming from? Both GTK and Qt do not need systemd.

shadow

Also I wanted to talk about this Lemmy thread, and the main part of the Wayland argument going on. It primarily trashes wlroots in favor of this "swc" library that can't do basic stuff, so neuswc is proposed. Apparently the only thing viable written in it is by the same author, this thing called Velox. In the example config it launches st and dmenu by default. Are these not well known Xorg programs? DWL is much more feature complete in this respect, but it uses the evil wlroots that's apparently bad. Maybe someone can share some more experiences about this. Why not use the foot terminal (not the GNOME one)?

Xorg programs work on Wayland via Xwayland. They work just fine, but obviously native applications are a bit nicer (since you may want to set Xwayland to only start when it is needed).

I have been using sway for three years now, which uses wlroots and is the Wayland alternative for i3. Most people do not like wlroots to say the least. For suckless people, it is because of the bloat of the code, and for regular users it is because the XDG Desktop Portal of wlroots is quite underwhelming. I have never tried velox because it could not run on my system (probably my fault). I do, however, use foot, which has significantly more features than st (daemonisation, scrolling, custom colours, URL handling, and custom keybindings). For my standards, it works extremely well and only uses 20 MB of RAM.

sprinklednights

shadow

What about GUI toolkits? GTK4 and QT are becoming much more tightly integrated (if not outright dependent) on SystemD.

Where is that statement coming from? Both GTK and Qt do not need systemd.

I should have said GNOME and KDE, as I meant their ecosystems not the libraries specifically. While neither require them currently, they continue to make more moves in that direction.

sprinklednights

Xorg programs work on Wayland via Xwayland.

This seems to defeat the security purposes of switching to Wayland, though it is a nice compatibility layer.

Found a random video covering that wayland site, it seems to be spreading fast.

I think Alpine linux is pretty underrated, it has setup scripts for setting up your system and desktop of choice, and doesn't have the dependencies you mentioned other than OpenSSL. I tried it for a few days on a USB stick, but I don't have the time currently to learn how to harden it for security.

I still mainly use Debian tho.