I’m planning to move over to Guix over NixOS, as soon as my current situation improves and possibly import a new libre respecting laptop (Star Labs is thankfully available in India). I do have a very old laptop with a Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM with Guix installed already, and what has come to my attention is that it uses shepherd.
I’m not actually against or for systemd, in fact, I am not really sure why I should even care - maybe it is because I’m still not on to the level of a power user. Since I’m starting to learn kernel basics to prepare for GNU/Hurd contributions in the nearest possible future and shepherd seems to be what the GNU folks will be using, is there any reason why I should even care about the freedom of init system?
Edit: I’m asking this because I came across this blog - What is systemd and Why Should I Care? and also because Guix uses shepherd, and I’m not sure how I’ll be affected.
You generally shouldn’t care about systemd, nor choose a distro or an OS just based on it’s init system, as they all ultimately achieve the same thing… Start and stop services. And while I don’t personally use it on my main desktop, it’s just because I don’t need any of it’s functionality and OpenRC IS a bit faster in my experience, though I can see why systemd the default on most distros, it’s extremely versatilea, powerful and handles a lot of things that you’d need separate programs for…