this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Debian makes the deliberate choice to have older versions of software in the repository so that there is plenty of time to become aware of and fix any problems that come up. This is a reasonable stance to take, but in practice often newer software is stable enough, so Ubuntu essentially starts with Debian as a base and then adds newer version of software into the repository. This approach made it very popular, and as a result it effectively became a standard (in addition to RedHat/Fedora), which is significant because it means that a lot of software is now packaged to work best with Ubuntu. Both of these factors motivate many distributions to base themselves on Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu also adds in a lot of stuff that... people disagree with, but the good news is that a distribution is just a collection of software, so there is nothing stopping someone from picking all of the parts of Ubuntu that they like, and leaving out all of the parts that they don't.
An init system is essentially infrastructure that runs underneath the hood to orchestrate what things get activated and when. Some people (not myself) consider systemd to be overly complicated so they prefer something that they consider to be simpler, and others oppose systemd on essentially ideological grounds for not being sufficiently "Unix-like". If you do not understand enough about init systems to understand the difference between these systems and their pros and cons, then I would highly recommend that you not care at all about what your init system is (outside of curiosity for its own sake), and be a little suspicious of distributions for which their init system is their main selling point compared to other distributions, because it probably means that they focus their time and energy on things that you have do not care about in practice. (Having said that, don't get me wrong: the great thing about Linux is that if someone really cares about this kind of thing, then they are completely free to tinker to their heart's content until it is exactly the way that they want it!)