RunIt, say.

I suspect the OP is referencing Void Linux[1] which makes use of runit as its init system. If not, it's the first thing that came to mind.

I'm not sure it's necessarily a better solution as it requires more manual interaction out of the box (namely creating symlinks by hand among other duties), but that might be argued as a feature. There appears to be a wrapper or two out there to automate away some of the tedium.

[1] https://voidlinux.org/

s9

What should someone google in order to find out more about this? (i tried, i got lots of information about the samsung phone, even with -samsung and various incantations of 'init', 'processes', 'linux', etc)

I think the OP meant s6 and not s9.

runit, s6 and also nosh are all daemontool-style init systems, which have a somewhat different idea how to do things than systemd all, but all are inspired by the original daemontools package.

s6 and nosh have decent overviews:

https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/guide/introduction.html

The original daemontools: https://cr.yp.to/daemontools/faq/create.html#why

I'll let others decide whether these are better or worse than systemd. I go with whatever my distro would give me, since picking a different init system is too much work...