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Add to SafariWhen comparing OpenRC vs s6, the Slant community recommends OpenRC for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux init systems?” OpenRC is ranked 1st while s6 is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose OpenRC is:
OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro No feature creep
OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.
Pro Extremely simple
All configuration is done via shell scripts and symlinks. Shell scripts can then use various specialized utilities to ease the development of init scripts.
Pro Fast
OpenRC builds on top of sysvinit and adds some more useful features (like parallel booting) while still the simplicity that sysvinit is know for. Because of this it generally boots faster than other init systems, especially when parallel booting is enabled.
Pro UNIX-Like
Does one thing and does it well.
Pro Less dependency creep
Using OpenRC does not lock in a distribution by providing specific NON-POSIX extra services which programs then would rely on.
Pro A very balanced compromise
Basically OpenRC doesn't replace SysV init, but rather works with it, providing features that SysV is lacking while taking advantage of its benefits. It's also used by a fair amount of reasonably popular distros and is well supported and developed.
Pro Very efficient on system resources
Uses multi-core and ram very efficiently.
Pro Portable
It can be ported to other UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.
Pro Flexible and extensible
I can add a new startup script for most cases in under five minutes. The ability to quickly insert new applications into the system is a big help.
Pro Not bloated
Pro Deterministic
It always initializes a system the same way; if OpenRC booted and ran a system properly today, it will boot and run properly tomorrow, and the next day.
Pro The perfect init
s6-rc, provides a real Service Manager, a Services Supervisor with Parallel RC and logging, upon demand. The perfect continuation, of Runit.
ISC License, is not a barrier, Ibut instead, is so friendly to Open Source and Free Software Licence.
Pro Rock solid
Portable: Linux, BSD, Solaris
POSIX.
Can be compiled with musl.
A lot of features including dependencies service management.
Easy to implement with the conjunction of 66 which provide frontend file for service declaration, automatic logger creation,nested supervision tree,user service,instantiated services and many more.
Best alternative ever. Work out of the box, PROC was made on Gentoo, Funtoo, Devuan, KISS linux, Adelie, Void, Antix.
Default init system and service manager on Obarun and from a long time ago.
Pro You can use all its components independently
Pro Runs on every POSIX system
Pro Fastest init
Fastest boot speed.
Pro ISC License
Cons
Con No socket activation
OpenRC does not have socket activation yet. It will be added in the future though.
Con Not widely offered across distrubutions
From Distrowatch, only ten distributions (of which 8 Linux, 1 BSD) officially support OpenRC, and offer it through their standard repos.
Con Not GPL
Con Heavy
It depends on libc, has a lot of code.
Con Not GPL
