Linux

I've recently spent a lot of time doing bare metal installs of a large number of non-systemd operating systems.

GhostBSD - Its BSD, so its stable and avoids the problems of Linux but supports less hardware especially 3D GPU's.

FreeBSD - as above but more effort to install & configure initially because its server oriented but makes a fine workstation nevertheless.

Alpine - Highly performant Linux oriented to container hosting but can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using nvidia except in nouveau driver.

Void - highly performant. more packages than Alpine. can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using anything but newest nvidia GPU's and even then strange unsolvable glitches.

Artix - look this is Arch with a non-systemd init (your choice of 3). Being Arch it inherits the repo's of bleeding edge packages but also inherits the heavy maintenance burden of Arch (if you know, you know). I'm just too bloody busy to baby sit an Arch install with all its nonsense.

Endeavour et al - wait for other OS's to implement work arounds to systemd's cancerous kowtowing to corporate America imposed surveillance laws.

Devuan - a drop in replacement for Debian. Inherits Debian's stability and ease of maintenance but with proven mature implementation of OpenRC init system.

The is the one I use for a calm happy life. To save time you can get a distro called 'Vendefoul Wolf Linux' which is Spanish in origin. Its a spin of Devuan but with a choice of GUI desktops and a GUI Calamares installer (the Devuan text mode TUI installer is fine, but whatever).

My daily driver is Vendefoul Wolf (Spanish for 'vengenance') LxQT desktop. Light, fast simple, stable. tip: download the 'weekly' iso's not the old 2025 ones.

I'm tempering the systemd thing as I do feel it is somewhat getting blown out of proportion. Though I did try some non systemd distros in a VM over the last week.

A bigger issue for me is this push to embrace AI. It seems all the American tech companies are jumping on board and Red Hat is no exception.

I want to love Fedora but this is the last straw for me.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/31/red_hat_ai_dev/

Essentially any distro with funding primarily from US tech companies is going to go to shit. It's only a matter of time.

I do run EndeavourOS on my main PC and it's pretty great. I have not seen any statement regarding their position on the age attestation crap. I'll jump ship if they come out in favour of it. I just hope they do not.

I think it's too early to be making decisions based on this alone.

I've been using Linux 20+ years as my main os. Most of that time I've been an arch user. I moved to void Linux 2 weeks ago. I'm very much a start from scratch and build to my liking sort of person, so I just extracted the rootfs base system to a fresh partition, configured everything through a chroot, and booted the new system. Took me 2 days to get to a point I was happy with. I really like void Linux. It boots faster, the init system is much simpler and I feel I understand it better than systemd already. The package manager is really good, and easy to use. I have no complaints.

For yourself, void Linux offers an xfce ready made live version, so everything is already configured and you can test it out in a live setup first with no permanent install. I didn't test the installer as did a manual install, however it is not a gui installer.

and the third has stated they will not implement age attestation methods.

Do you have a source l, I went looking earlier and couldn't find anything

We're a long way from January and we still don't really know what's going to happen outside of a few corporate distros.

I think both Artix and Void have also said that they do not plan to implement age attestation. I haven't used Artix all that much aside from playing around with it in a vm, but i have daily driven Void for about 2 years total probably. Artix is probably the easiest to install if you choose the gui installer. Void has a guided ncurses installer and it isn't super difficult, but it does help if you have some experience with manually installing arch. In particular they'll ask you to format your drive using a cli tool. Void does offer an xfce image though, so once you get it installed you've got a gui ready to go. Runit is pretty simple to use. It uses shell scripts so that's something to keep in mind if you want to create a custom service, but other than that you basically just use ln -s commands to enable services, sv down to stop, and sv up to start a service.

for me, i'll find the closest arch to manjaro that simply does not rely on systemd