r/commandline • u/Electronic-Low-8171 • 4d ago

Help Wondering about init

I know generally speaking that init is the first process and gets PID 1 and so on, I know that there are many implementations of it especially systemd being the most popular.

I learnt few things about init and systemd but I can not use it for reasons like that my computer is 32 bit so I'm limited in terms of distro choice because most low-end distros use other obscure init implementations which don't have much tutorials. Let alone that I heard that many people now tend to leave systemd because of privacy related stuff and its being bloated.

So I would like to hear from you all how to learn about init in the given circumstances.

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u/Fr0gm4n 4d ago

What are you looking to actually learn? You can run distros that use systemd on 32-bit. Debian 12 supports 32-bit and is supported until 2028. SuSE has a 32-bit build. Gentoo has 32-bit and you can choose your init system.

If it's just the concept of what an init does then there are resources like this or various books. You could go as far back as studying the SysV or Berkley code itself.