Since the "old" SystemV Init subsystem, sysVinit, was mostly given up in
the Red Hat, Ubuntu, Arch, and Debian spaces, there were a few
distributions that "held out".
It's hard to believe that it has been close to a decade that those
controversial changes were first made. To be honest with you, when I've
run them on various distributions, I haven't had any real "problems"
with them, at least from a technical point of view. I've never had to
dig deeply into the bowels of the technical details to resolve any
issue, and that's a good thing, because the binary nature of the systemd
replacement has been: 1. It's "binary", so everything it does also
comes with a tool to manage it. 2. SystemD is WAY more than just an
init process, and I think that was the other thing that upset so many
people, though it has subsequently been adopted in quite a few places
and the noise everywhere, EXCEPT in the distributions that DID NOT adopt
it has abated quite a bit.
What's runit then? Well, runit is another effort to replace the old
UNIX System V approach that has been around almost since the beginning,
not just of the nineties Linux era, but before that in the seventies and
eighties with the original UNIX systems, many of which continue to
exist in back end server rooms with legacy hardware and software.
Runit is a fairly minimal init process handler, so that makes systemD
haters happy, but it does not do very much. It's fast, though, so if you
really want a process initializer that ONLY does process initiation, it
definitely does that. It doesn't completely handle all aspects of
initialization (other than starting processes, so if you have any
complaints, it'll be with "missing features" but NOT with a lack of
speed. AntiX 19 with runit is as fast or faster than the usual lean,
mean, light and nimble system, and if you don't expect much from an init
process and you really do want it to only initialize and fork
additional processes, runit is perfect for JUST that. Don't expect much
with log files or fancy handling when changing run levels, it is not
very special and has only the most basic (though sufficient)
capabilities in this regard. antiX runit on the whole is great for a
system that is simple in the basic sense and fast.
