He purged systemd from Debian for OpenRC. The boot didn't survive the command

One apt line, a laptop that wouldn't boot

Daniel Cordova's post, Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian, starts from discomfort rather than a benchmark. His "first real kick" came when age-verification law was being drafted and systemd added a field to support it: an init system, he felt, had no business there, on top of having absorbed a bootloader, a partitioning scheme, user management, and an installer. So he ran the swap in a single chained command: sudo apt purge --allow-remove-essential systemd && sudo apt install openrc sysvinit-core.

The machine didn't come back up. By his account OpenRC was either removed during the purge or never installed; he recovered through rescue mode, reconnected WiFi, and reinstalled it by hand. Afterward, battery status and audio stopped working. A remoteproc systemd unit he converted into a shell script in /etc/init.d/ he admitted was a stopgap: "I need to convert it into a proper OpenRC script." His verdict is cautiously positive — "Currently OpenRC does the work" — wrapped in a plea for "the unix freedom to use whatever you want."

The thread: the install was the easy part

The most useful reply in the thread ignored ideology and read the command. The && means the second half only runs if the first fully succeeds:

"I don't see that installing openrc before deleting systemd… My hunch would be that uninstalling systemd failed halfway through." — a reader who traced the failure to the chained apt command

A second voice named what OpenRC actually costs you, and it isn't the install:

"when it crashes, what restarts it, and what guarantees it came up only after its dependencies were actually ready… That dependency ordering and the cgroup resource accounting are the real work, and OpenRC hands both back to you." — a commenter who zeroed in on the converted remoteproc supervision

Then the older argument flared. Several insisted the experiment confuses two things wearing one name:

"This makes the mistake of confusing systemd the service manager and systemd the project… systemd has not integrated age verification. All that's been discussed is a simple field to allow a user to register a DoB." — a sysadmin who separated the service manager from the umbrella project

From there the thread split cleanly. An ex-founder type and a Gentoo holdout welcomed any pressure on systemd — "systemd desperately needs competition… it's also janky to use" — while a reformed skeptic flatly credited it for making Linux viable: "Systemd is what is turning Linux into a viable modern OS. You need something to tie all the parts of the OS together with a unified API." And a recurring practical note kept surfacing: if you want a systemd-free Debian, Devuan already ships exactly that, no chained purge required. The KISS principle Cordova invoked, the thread suggested, isn't simpler — it just moves the supervision, ordering, and accounting work from the init system onto you.