I agree with the general recommendation for OpenRC, since it's the oldest (it's older than systemd!), most widely deployed and best documented alternative init system. Any problem you have, it's likely other people already went through it and documented their solution.
Dinit is also a good pick though. It's also a first class citizen in Artix (you won't miss any system services), and it's the closest in behavior to systemd. It might have changed, but dinit has parallel startup by default, while OpenRC doesn't (it can be enabled, but its creators don't trust it much), which makes dinit boot much faster.
Network Speed....Holy Moly, what a difference.
On the other bloated beast. average DL Speeds 800Kib, occasionally 2Mib.
On Artix, 15Mib, my -Syu took a few minutes instead of an hour, no more throttling. Some countries are haters.
I've been coming across this project and found it interesting, but I want to address a few things from looking at, running it without any services, and somewhat tinkering with the code (I wanted to try it with some test services, but it seems to hang on start_services for both master and version 0.2.0):
- While I do understand that shed's primary use case is for GUI sessions (thus, usually summoned by .xinitrc), I think this has the potential to be a full-blown user service manager (for something written in shell, it can be even integrated with turnstile).
Currently, we export GUI_SESSION_PID in .xinitrc so that shedc can read it later. Why not save $GUI_SESSION_PID to a file to be read by shedc to detect if a shed session is running? Since it already uses XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, I think it can be something like /run/user/$USER_ID/shed/session (I also believe shed should get its own directory inside $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR). This way if I log into my system on another tty, I can still control my shed-controlled daemon.
Overall, I actually like it, but unfortunately I can't run any services since it seems it's stuck on start_services. I can post logs if needed.
- When shed exits without shedc (by Ctrl+C or any unexpected exits, for instance), it should also do things like shedc logout so that it can cleanly exit without leaving anything behind, I think a trap would do nicely.