I second that. I feel like I have less and less choice. I can either accept all systemd provides or switch to some fringe distro.
I switched from Windows to Linux 20 years ago to have more choice.
I switched from Windows to Linux 20 years ago to have more choice.
I think it has more to do with the linux kernel being much more advanced than the others, and some of the userspace depending more and more on these advanced features. But I’m not sure about this. Aren’t you referring instead to debian itself providing packages for all of them and the package manager running on each distro? Because I can’t really believe you could just swap out the kernel and be on your way in most cases. If it is the latter, than it was more due to the fact that debian maintainers voted against supporting other systems, because it is a great amount of additional work.
It's a bit more direct than that - previous init systems were kernel-agnostic whereas systemd is explicitly tightly coupled to Linux and udev, and encourages the rest of userland to be tightly coupled to it.
> I think it has more to do with the linux kernel being much more advanced than the others, and some of the userspace depending more and more on these advanced features.
I wouldn't say "more advanced" - in many ways FreeBSD jails are a better technical solution than Linux's various container systems.
E.g. in Gentoo you can choose to use SystemD or OpenRC, but I think that most other distros don't provide such a choice.
And of course after a certain size it has to do with network effects, but it was chosen based on merits — for example debian voted multiple times on the issue and I would say their voting system puts most countries’ to shame.
I believe up until recently the vote on debian was basically use systemd but if the maintainer wants to, they can also support alternative init systems, but there was not much interest. But of course anyone can help the fringe distros on another init systems to make them less fringe.
Yes, I absolutely agree regarding the effort. (not sure about that vote - I honestly didn't follow that discussion)
In parallel, some software (cannot recall - maybe the Gnome window mgr) does rely (in its original form) on SystemD being there => I don't think that's fair, kind of forcing the distros that want to offer it to adopt it => I don't like it - I do see the advantage of having that kind of integration, but I still don't like it :P
The dependency no longer exists because some people took logind from systemd, made it a standalone package and called it elogind lol, and now you can use that instead of logind.
1) eudev works
2) elogind works
3) you can still use sysvinit or literally the multitude of others
The fact that this is so rare it has to be pointed out like this kind of speaks for itself.
> 1) eudev works 2) elogind works 3) you can still use sysvinit or literally the multitude of others.
I am aware of these and use them on nearly all my machines.
Note that both elogind and eudev required a significant amount of work by the Gentoo community when they were pulled out of the systemd codebase.
You may not mind the decisions others make on your behalf, or care about the options that are no longer possible, but that doesn't mean that Linux hasn't lost some of its identity.
Yes, in the sense, that if you want, you can eventually make it the way you want.
No in the sense, that others won't do it for you; they will make linux distribution the way they consider it best, not how you consider it the best.
So if you want to pick and choose the components the way you want and not the way the distributions consider the best, be ready to put in the manhours.