This is easily the most comprehensive and informative reply to the issue with systemd I’ve seen so far. Thank you for the response, I can see why their increasing dominance is alarming.

I’m certainly not at liberty to pass judgment on whether it deserves its current reputation, since I barely know enough to make it work to my needs. But I would be most interested to see how things play out.

Thank you, that was an excellent reply. I vaguely knew there were arguments over systems, but had no idea of the details.

What you say about their overly large power, though: if they make a bad choice, and enough people agree it’s a bad choice, can’t a new project just fork systemd and take it in a good direction?

It’s systemd or bust because it’s so much better than any other init system.

Also, your post glosses over the biggest issues people have with systemd. The lead developer was a complete fucking asshole and rubbed people the wrong way. Imo, that’s where most of the hate stems. The guy was a tool and the initial backlash spiraled from there.

But I guess being a jerk and being a sea-changing dev go hand-in-hand. Eg stallman, Torvalds, etc

Also, my favorite thing about the gnu diehards complaining that systemd does too much and doesn’t follow the unix principals… Emacs enters the chat. It also enters the email, text editor, ide, etc.

this comment shows how the word of mouth actually distorted the argument

its not the linux philosophy but one sentence of the unix philosophy (linux is not unix)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”

besides being over 40 years old at this point

fun fact the linux kernel would actually not really fit this since it is an monolithic kernel