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Comment by yladiz | Hacker News Reader

As someone out of the loop with any of this (I've always just been content with using Debian as-is, and I haven't done much work with systemd), can someone explain why systemd is as bad as it seems to be? As in, why is it so bad that an entire major Linux distro was forked and created with the seemingly sole purpose of removing this program?

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I don't have issues with systemd myself, but from what I read in similar threads the problems come down to systemd being different from sysv init.

Changing old init scripts to systemd scripts is un-asked for work for many. And it is made by a polarising figure, which leads to emotional refusal.

This ground is covered in the duplicate Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167935

> why do people hate it?

Poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, half-baked ideas, legendary feature creep that presents a corollary to Zawinsky's Law, awful developers, clear political agendas in the devteam, Embrace-Extend-Extinguish tactics, against the basic UNIX concept of "many small apps that do one thing and do it well", an informal adoption of Windows service/logging techniques, political lobbying by the developers, and a literal RPC-based backdoor into the enforceability of the GPL.

a literal RPC-based backdoor into the enforceability of the GPL

Oh, I didn't hear that one before - any more info?

Some of the 4chan people trolling about systemd try to make people believe that communicating over tcp sockets, pipes or dbus with other processes is a "backdoor" around the GPL. Because a non-free program could talk to a GPL progam. Shocking!

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