Dinit Alternatives

dinit reviews and mentions

• Sixos: A Nix OS without systemd [video]
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
• Dinit: Service Monitoring / "Init" System
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2025
• Chimera Linux
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2023

  The author has a high-level overview doc here: https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISO...

  Now, of course, with service management the devil is in the details, so before you use something as system-wide init, I find it useful to ask yourself: How do they restart services? Do they give up at some point? How do they notify administrators of failures? Do they detect crashloops? How configurable is the logger? What CLIs are there to debug the state of the system (which service was first to fail, where is its definition)? How to make ephemeral or parametrised services? How to add pre-start, post-start, pre-stop, post-stop hooks? Can you use environment variables in your commands, and where do they come from?

  I don't think you can find answers to some of these questions in docs. Once you do learn the answers, they may be disappointing - I indeed found myself quite disappointed in systemd after having to debug many failed-to-boot machines. With s6, I never run it, but there are few choices that raise eyebrows, e.g. the restart delay is hardcoded in source code to be 1 second. With dinit, I have yet to finish reading all its manpages, but at least timeout and restart policies are configurable.

• Show HN: Dinit – specialized init for Docker containers
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jul 2023

  Not to be confused with https://github.com/davmac314/dinit

• are there any good reasons for me to avoid systemd
  2 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 5 Jun 2023

  Still, I applaud efforts like s6 and Dinit as competition is a good thing in general. I hope they'll continue to be improved upon until they've become viable alternatives to systemd for most users.

• Gentoo 66 init or dinit
  2 projects | /r/Gentoo | 22 May 2023

  You can download dinit from github https://github.com/davmac314/dinit. (also read everything about it) Do a simple make && make install which should install it to /sbin/dinit No need to remove systemd or openrc. /sbin/init should be symlinked to whatever init system you use. Read the instructions on dinits page. All the services go into /etc/dinit.d. And you can "dinitctl enable servicename" to enable it. I threw the services I have on my system up at https://gitlab.com/fictitiousexistence-public/dinit-gentoo/ You can copy them and enable / disable whatever you need. Most services I jacked from artix since they have a supported instance of dinit.

• A discussion about the Ultimate Linux Desktop
  5 projects | /r/linuxmasterrace | 13 May 2023

  It got mass-adopted while being imperfect, so that's to be expected. Thankfully its inception and the criticism that followed have paved the way for the likes of dinit and s6.

• Which do you use systemd or openrc? Why do you use what you use?
  3 projects | /r/Gentoo | 21 Apr 2023

  this page by Davin McCall, creator of dinit.

• Run a script when connection is established and ready?
  1 project | /r/Tailscale | 12 Apr 2023

  I use dinit do manage services on my home server. One of them is Caddy, that shares TLS/SSL cert state with my remote server by using Redis on said remote server. However, since this means that I need to have established a remote connection first before starting Caddy, I would like to know of a method to check if tailscale has in fact finished connecting.

• Fastest way to boot Void Linux?
  2 projects | /r/voidlinux | 24 Mar 2023

  I've used a ton of improvements but I know this community knows a lot more about some parts than me. So here I come. I'm currently using efibootmgr to create an efistub to bypass grub. Using base-minimal with ncurses so terminal apps work. Also I use this in my /etc/dracut.conf.d/local.conf: hostonly="yes" omit_dracutmodules=" network plymouth " And that works perfectly. Don't know exactly what network or plymouth are for but they are not strictly required. Also I use dinit: void_dinit, dinit. This works perfectly fine and works like expected after a little troubleshooting. Also for making dinit about 2x faster is swapping coreutils to sbase. I only use ls from gnu coreutils which is something I may want to switch but I haven't come to finding a good alternative to ls that has colors (exa exists but is 11x as big) Things that I could think of that could improve stuff are: kernel, maybe initramfs. Maybe something else I've looked over. What is all made by GNU anyway? I may have forgot something Void Linux uses.

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