Slackware doesn't use it, and Patrick Volkerding recently got a Patreon account set up so Slackware 15.0 or 14.3 will hopefully be out soonish with updated packages. I'm writing this on 14.2 and have been running it since it came out with basically no issues. Also have it on a backup server, runs great.

I love slack.

There's something extremely beautiful in launching htop and seeing less than 10 processes (including those of root).

But it’s 2020, and we need package management.

Use Alpine or something then. I use Alpine as well on a server, OpenBSD on a server, slackware on a server, slackware on my laptop... There's some options. We even use Devuan to host OP's essay, although we'll eventually move to openbsd probably for other reasons.

In terms of package management... why do you need it? I have no problem maintaining everything with slackpkg and sbopkg along with slackbuilds.org. Sometimes it takes a while to find all the requirements for an application and add them to a queue, but once it's set up it's just sbopkg, click on update, upgrade, and you're good. It's pretty much rock solid once I get everything installed and I haven't missed package management much at all. My main gripe is the old packages in 14.2 but -current has a lot newer stuff. I don't mind waiting though.

It's 2020, and nix and guix both run on top of Slackware just fine.

My bet is that it depends on whether NixOS or Guix takes over the world. (And my bet within a bet is that it will be NixOS.)

Void Linux, amazingly awesome distro.

Second this, an incredible distro with an impressive package manager.

Except its maintainer recently quit.

That's not accurate. There are many competent maintainers.

OpenRC, it's available on some Linux distros.

Gentoo is reaching out to you.

Or if you don't want to go source-based, maybe Void or Alpine

Devuan.org

I still don't entirely get the point of Devuan. I put Debian buster on a low-RAM embedded box, and since systemd eats up precious RAM I'd rather keep, I just switched to OpenRC with

    apt install openrc && apt purge systemd

If I needed it, Debian packages elogind as well.

Rebooted and it worked perfectly. Now, I get that Debian doesn't really support OpenRC[0] (or sysvinit), and it could break in horrible ways when bullseye goes stable, or get removed entirely, but... I don't see why we need a fork before that happens? It seems like it's a lot of work to maintain a distro fork, when I feel like that effort could be more productively redirected to stronger maintenance and advocacy of OpenRC and/or sysvinit in Debian itself?

[0] Debian's openrc package hasn't been updated in a little over a year, which is indeed concerning. sysvinit does seem to be more actively maintained, though.

Late reply, sorry.

The problem isn't systemd's init. It's probably fine.

The problem is the systemd project is taking over the userspace with mutually cross-linked modules.

Devuan was started by a group of Debian maintainers who disagreed with the direction systemd was taking Debian.