I recently installed EndeavourOS on my laptop (previously using Debian) and noticed that it now uses dracut by default. I’ve had EOS on my desktop for a few years and it uses mkinitcpio. I saw in the wiki that transitioning to dracut is quite easy, but after Googling for a while I’m still in doubt as to whether there would be any advantage for me in doing so.
My system is pretty vanilla. It has an AMD GPU and no onboard video. My bootloader is GRUB. I don’t use LUKS, LVM, RAID or btrfs and the only change I made from the default mkinitcpio configuration was disabling image compression to speed up generation. Pretty much my only demand is for the pacman hook to work. So what changes could I expect, if any, upon switching over to dracut? Is it recommended to do so, or is there no need to bother? Are there plans to drop support for mkinitcpio in the future?
Have to agree, if it’s not broken why bother. That said when EOS first made the switch I switched my main laptop to dracut, and honestly from a daily driver viewpoint I don’t see an impact compared to the other computers in the house.
Of course my answer is solely based on my use case, which is far from the ones of superusers’.
I have a pretty-everything-vanilla Arch setup. I have never had to configure mkinitcpio apart from those occasions when I had enabled hibernation and needed to add the resume hook to mkinitcpio.conf. But then you would need to do that for dracut as well.
So on my system, mkinitcpio runs on the same config which is shipped by the package. Therefore, for me personally, whatever configurability or ease of use that dracut brings to the table, is not relevant.
With that said, I have, as an exercise, switched one of my systems to dracut following the ArchWiki. But then I encountered some issues when dracut was not generating new initrds automatically after some updates to packages like ostree and btrfs-progs where mkinitcpio seemed to be doing this. I never got around to investigate it further so I took the easy way out and switched back.
