this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Coincidentally, today I removed systemd from my laptop (Debian Trixie.) It was reasonably easy. I booted from a USB drive into a shell through debian's "rescue" mode and typed plausible-looking apt commands until it worked. For some reason it didn't create /etc/inittab and I made a typo when I tried to do it myself, but other than that no problems. Differences noticed so far that a normal user would care about: none. If nothing goes wrong I guess I'll do the same on my desktop at home this weekend, because why not.
Nothing against systemd, but I think it's valuable to continue having other options and it was fun to see that it's still pretty easy to use them (maybe harder if you're a GNOME user, idk.)
I find it extremely hard to believe that worked, let alone left you with a bootable system, let alone properly working.
You know, just maybe...this whole doomsaying about systemd running everything on a Linux system is a bit overblown?
I was surprised as well. I found the instructions at debian.org somewhat confusing, and I'm not sure if they're completely comprehensive or accurate — but they were the most useful reference I found and provide a good idea of what it's like.