It's not a technical thing, it's cultural. The two sides are playing tug-of-war with the same OS, and systemd's winning, but maybe it would be better to have a positive culture around the changes they're making instead of always having people dragging on the rope. Some forks have been good in the past - EGCS/GCC for example.
Every major Linux distro has chosen systemd as their future. I think that means whoever wants something different needs to change their name, rather than every major Linux distro changing theirs. Just as the Gnome 2 fans chose a new name for their future based on that lineage.
..and here I was thinking they chose it as an init system.
Gentoo is a major Linux distro too.
Gentoo officially uses OpenRC (and eudev), which is what you get if you follow the installation handbook. However, Gentoo also encourages choice and allows many options for init, daemon management, etc, which includes systemd. Other options ( are also available, too, at least unofficially.
> if the user makes no decision
While OpenRC is the official default, the "compile and setup everything yourself" nature of Gentoo makes this kind of statement somewhat irrelevant. One of the major reasons to use Gentoo is the ability to pick the components you want in your OS so it meets your specific needs. So yes, while there is a default, the concept of having a "default" is less important when you are installing everything manually.
I guess one can argue about what level of popularity makes something a "major Linux distro". I, personally, wouldn't put Gentoo into that category, unless I saw some evidence of dramatic increase in its usage.
Do you have an example of a distro that feels that way?
I only follow Fedora and RHEL/CentOS close enough to know, and they're still quite pro-systemd on all fronts, though there's still some hybrid stuff sticking around for backward compatibility and user comfort (so, a lot of stuff people were used to doing in the past still works the same on systemd-based systems).
Void Linux switched from systemd to runit.
Systemd is just fixing things that have been broken for a very long time.
This. I for one don't miss the mess of shell scripts for network management, init, bootloader, cron, etc. I personally think systemd already does 10x better at each of these tasks then the broken scripts have ever done.
That's not what has been done.
systemd unit files are not "scripts". They are declarative configuration files, usually orders of magnitude smaller than the initscripts, network scripts, etc. that they replace. The Apache unit file on RHEL7 is ~17 lines long, and it replaced an initscript that was a couple hundred lines long.
It is a difference of both degree and kind.
Just saying, the de facto ways of using systemd are starting to diverge a lot from the intended behaviour. And of course, the de facto usage is what we'll judge each piece of software's merits on...eventually.
On the other hand, Linux has a history of _forcing_ desktop users to mess with device management for the simplest of tasks, e.g. making their audio devices work.
So you've never restarted a service on your desktop system?
I don't use a Linux desktop (I often retry) because that is unattainable.
I think of systemd as one component in an attempt to create a good desktop environment based on the Linux kernel. Sort of like how Android is an attempt to create a good phone environment based on the Linux kernel.
Based on that, I think it makes more sense to come up with a separate name for something like a Gnome/Wayland/Weston/systemd/Linux combination. While we are at it we could come up with a separate name for a Linux based system configured primarily by writing scripts. We should stop pretending that there is some sort of generic combination of things called "Linux".
systemd works on systems as small as embedded systems up to huge hpc systems. It's not just a desktop thing.