Do you have a recommendation for a Linux server distribution without systemd and why?
I have always dismissed the use of rolling release distributions for servers. I am biased--I am coming from more than twenty years of using RHEL and CentOS. The last year or two, I have been questioning my biases which eventually lead to me finding Obarun and this community.

Based on your response, you use Obarun on servers. @ fungal_net can you share your experience?
antiX runs on Debian Stable branch, with systemd stripped off. I use it as a backup OS, It's pretty neat. Fastest installation you will ever see in a million years.

I think they have a graphical software package installer that will install LAMP stack
@ 4L1V3, thank you.

I will take a closer look at antiX. I appreciate the recommendation.
I disagree with antix .... unless you are really masochistic in running a sysv server.

What is a server? Either monitors data coming in from wan distributing it/making it available to lan, or takes data from lan, and offers it to a wan. Whether a firewall, mailserver, fileserver, http/ftp/....tp , ssh, ..etc ... it is all it does.
Nothing can do this more reliably than s6. Just try it, kill pid1 and see what you get, .... don't try it on any other system.

Skarnet's server is running for years unless it is brought down for mechanical or kernel change maintenance, it is unbreakable.
Once you setup a minimal system to serve whatever you want it to serve, I doubt anything even comes close to reliability, and 66 gives you the tools to acquire live monitoring of anything going on.

It is not like you are running plasma, chrome, libreoffice on a server. I have a stick with a minimal obarun system and an ssh server, anything that has a problem, I stick the thing in, boot it and access the system from a distance with my own machine. There is not much I know to do I can not do with this mini-server. Sometimes it is not upgraded for months, but even when it does it keeps working. Boot entry hasn't changed. It boots linux-lts. Try an upgrade with void or debian-forks and forget to update the boot loader and see if you can access that system again.
@ fungal_net, all good points.

After I do a deep dive into S6, I will better understand the magnitude of time and effort in developing missing unit files. Adding "S6 & 66 deep dive" to my task list.

Thank you for the recommendation.
Do a dive in 66 first, it makes sense quicker, mildly take a look at the underlying theory of daemontools s6/runit for reference.
If you try to become an s6 expert we might not see you for some long time :)

The reason 66 is of value is because s6 is so complex.
obviously not. We talk about server even consolekit is not activated :)
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@ techore

I can not answers in a few lines because this is not possible for this domain. I would say that any distro can be used as a server but not all of them will suit your need. House, small medium or large company, or anything else, but also in what purpose and for whom, are just the smaller set of things to consider. Whether it is s6 / 66 or systemd as init, I would say this is the last thing to consider.
@ jean-michel, you are correct.

Seeing how folks here are more like minded to myself than my old distribution, I was interested in knowing what server OS you were using--I need to move all my services from CentOS7. The better question would have been "What Server OS are you using and why?" Also, I didn't want to list requirements since I am doing a lot of soul searching and redefining them.

I will put more thought in my posts in the future. :D
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techore wrote "What Server OS are you using and why?"
As eric answered, we use Gentoo because this distro meets our needs, I know it very well, it's very flexible so if upstream changes do not satisfy me I can create my own overlay and customize the ebuild as I want, which is what I'm doing, and finally via my overlay it use s6/66. To this I can also add the ease to customize the kernel and the possibility of optimizing binairies by passing option to the build to take into account the cpu architecture .
Sounds like I need to take a closer look at Gentoo.

Thank you!
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You can, but you should focus on one thing at a time. As eric answered, we use Obarun because this distro meets our needs for the Git repository, he know it very well, it's lightweight from a minimal installation and can be optimized too if you take the time to rebuild some packages which obviously requires some work as it's a binary based distribution.

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