Status on 2020/12/20, 08:36

The more you use, the more you learn... that's a good Linux metaphor, and a genuine truism. Having switched to Artix Linux, an Arch-based rolling-release distro without the use of systemd, I recently found myself struggling to understand how to start and stop services in it. Turns out that one of the goals of becoming systemd-free is to restore a classic init system a-la BSD, with a start and stop script for such "daemons."

So, if anyone has been having this same problem, here's how you can solve it (with OpenRC):

Install the software you want to run as daemon. Example: tor.
Install its init package. In Artix, this follows package-openrc convention, which, for Tor, would be tor-openrc.
To start the service in a systemctl fashion, run as root: rc-service tor start

And that's about it! It's so great to be able to learn and solve things yourself in Linux!