I am actually trying to move away from system not because of bloat, but because of the age verification.
Not sure if they will keep pushing it after it is clear that linux have been excampted from new laws, I am currently just waiting and see
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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Systemd: hate it for what it is and how it's built, and continue hating it for its capitulation to intrusive surveillance.
I use AntiX (core) with runit, and it's basically just an opinionated Debian with less systemd bloat (and extra packages from MXLinux repo). It works swimmingly on my laptop with an i3-4030U Lenovo Flex 2 (although I did upgrade to 16 GB of memory). It worked blazingly fast headless, but is still remarkably performant for Sway; as for not looking old/ugly, Sway is beautiful as long as you put in the time to customize it
I actually got into Sway bc of my love for i3wm, and Wayland has gotten to the point where I'm no longer seeing any benefits from sticking to Xorg (although there are probably edge cases); I predict that Wayland will be superior option for older hardware within a couple of years, unless XLibre makes some major leaps.
are screensharing and remote desktop on wayland still horrible? my experience last year ether does not work or keep asking for permission that I cannot allow all the time.
You "found out" it relies on systemd and systemd is bloated? Which bloat exactly are you talking about?
I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make in terms of resource usages to ditch systemd, but what i can say is that Void is a great distro. Runit boots blazingly fast, xbps is probably no joke the fastest package manager i've ever used, but also very robust and can handle very outdated systems just fine. I've never tried Devuan so i don't have an opinion on it.
I doubt Debian requires systemd in order to work. However I do not see what your problem is with systemd, do you have an example of problems caused by the bloat?
It is very light on the system and a much better way to handle services that the old init scripts. If you want to reduce system resources usage I'd look somewhere else. You are likely to save a few MB of ram and some cycles of your cpu by removing systemd, but I doubt any significant amount.
Debian uses systemd exclusively for init. The distros op listed are some of the only ones that remain that do not force it.
I agree with the rest of what you said ;)
I run Debian on a Thinkpad x130e. systemd bloat is basically a myth, and of all the things to work on reducing system resource use, it’s not quite last in line, but pretty close to it. In general systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success.
I'm running Devuan + Enlightenment on an old chromebook with a 16g drive and 4g ram. It's perfectly usable for everything except big PWAs like Gmail.
Void + Mango has been my jam.
Devuan has the easy repos like Debian, it's a pretty straight forward fork, as is AntiX.
Void is great, but a bit more complicated, not LFS insane complicated but like Arch/Gentoo "Git good noob" complicated.
Really, any is good, and I'm looking at moving from Debian to AntiX.
Good choice, though...
Systemd is a mess, and the main guy is one of those obnoxious tech bro types who doesn't listen to anyone and slaps crap in for no reason aside from his own ego. Everyone should be moving away from it, for many reasons.
The main issue is that nobody is able to come up with anything better. I use systemd because it made my job hugely easier and soved many problems. The main guy is an asshole but his work is good when you use it as he intended, which kind of is the point of open source.
If you don't like it you fork and do your own thing, until now nobody bothered, and this is telling.
Poettering did respectable work in snarky fields like audio and init nobody wanted to do something in and everybody complained about. I respect that despite he behaving like a spoiled asshole
I will admit things "just work" a lot better with systemd than it did fighting with configs under various init systems, but it's far too bloated and centralized.
Like how so many use flatpaks now, which has some great advantages like simple sandboxing and great fine control of permisions in a simple manner, but is has Flathub becoming an "app store" for Linux with all the issues that has elsewhere.
The more sstuff is consolidated, the more risk of one person fucking it all up.
It seems like my Windows installation was using over 4 Gb of RAM to just do absolutely nothing. Now I can be doing multiple things with Arch and systemd and it's about 2.1 Gb unless I'm gaming or something. Do people using the older init functions actually perform even better? That would be wild! If so, I might need to grab a copy of Artix or try OpenBSD again. I had a Linux usage gap and just don't recall the resource pull from old init any longer. My first installation was on a machine with a Windows XP dual boot. I think it was an x32 processor rather than an x32-x64. You could run those on just 4 Gb. Maybe even 2.
Do people using the older init functions actually perform even better?
The thing is, the really older init functions like Sysvinit or even Upstart aren't all that's being compared to Systemd. Alternatives include OpenRC, which is just a bit older than systemd and also improved during this time, and Dinit, which is newer than systemd.
I recently switched from Arch to Artix witg Dinit, I can't make a full comparison since I also didn't reinstall every program after the change and this might play into it, but I can at least say that the time it takes to boot is reduced, and I saw some people online making the same constatation.
As for the comparision with windows... I think regardless of init system and distros it is generally true that Linux does more out of less than windows, and that difference completely dwarfs the difference between specific init systems on Linux.
If your main goal is low resource use and fast, check out AntiX with Runit.
If you want system usages to be as low as possible you can skip a GUI all together, just use viu, mpv, w3m and such or you can look into projects like DSL (damn small Linux) and puppy Linux. If you're trying to maintain a mostly normal experience you can look into efficiencies in compiling your kernel and software a la Gentoo.
Does i3 do wayland?
No, but Sway is basically a drop in replacement.
Dwm or dwl
St or havoc with tmux for your terminal. Should be able to get under 8MB in usage.