I say insane because Arch is very much not made to run without systemd, and you would need to make a lot of changes to make it work without it.

So, as you say, just choose a distro without systemd

I didn’t even know that existed until today

You can very easily rollback updates from cache, and even rollback all your packages to a specific date in time.

It does get a bit iffy with AUR packages because you often compile them locally, so they would need to be recompiled from a specific commit.

Apt is one of the worst package managers I’ve used. Yum is also trash, dnf a bit better. But pacman is by far the best

Upgrading, like from Debian 12 to 13. It’s too complex, and if you install anything out of the ordinary (which you have to if you want packages from this decade), things get even more complicated.

I’ve used the same Arch installation for 14 years and only had issues when we switched to from sysvinit to systemd in 2012 because I didn’t read the news. Easily fixable though

After using Arch for 13 years I just learned what archinstall is…

Just install it normally, it’s literally like 10 commands.

You mean “can you remove systemd”? Short answer: yes.

Should you do it? Only if you’re fucking insane.

Just use Artix if you care that much

TYSKLAND

There’s no graphical installer officially, no. There are many Arch derivatives with installers though, like CachyOS.

Installing Arch is literally running like 10 commands, and it’s all very well documented.

1. Put your Archiso USB stick in and reboot
2. Format your disks if needed, mkfs
3. Mount root and boot partitions
4. Run pacstrap to install base system
5. Generate fstab
6. In chroot, set time and locale(s), set password, install bootloader
7. Choose/install a network manager, like systemd-networkd
8. Reboot

Now you’re running Arch. Make a user and install a DE, optionally.

And when in doubt, just check the Arch wiki, it’s a gold mine

Comparing Arch and Gentoo is wild. Arch is so much more simple and well documented.

less likely to break during an update

In my experience, Ubuntu and Debian are by far the most likely to break during an upgrade

It’s super easy to start a VM to try.

Just install qemu (and optionally enable KVM), then to run eg. Ubuntu installer:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -enable-kvm \
  -m 2G \
  -cpu host \
  -smp 2 \
  -cdrom /path/to/ubuntu-24.04-desktop-amd64.iso \
  -hda ubuntu-disk.qcow2 \
  -boot d \
  -vga virtio \
  -display gtk

After you install it, run the VM:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -enable-kvm \
  -m 2G \
  -cpu host \
  -smp 2 \
  -hda ubuntu-disk.qcow2 \
  -boot c \
  -vga virtio \
  -display gtk

Or use libvirt, like a layer on top to make things much simpler. I use virt-manager for GUI and virsh on command line.

Then where would the profitable incarceration enterprise prison get its slave labor?