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But (serious question), why does it matter that systemd has an ntp daemon or that it subsumed udev?> You say, disparagingly, that it is tightly-coupled and opaque (binary).
> Why is loosely coupled better in these cases specifically?
It creates extra work for others.
udev is far older than systemd; maintainership of the former was eventually inherited by one the latter's lead maintainers, who decided to move the latter into the former, at first promising that the former, which has applications reaching far outside systemd, could still be built and used independently.
That promise weakened after about two years and it became increasingly difficult to build and use udev without systemd; — some embedded systems that use udev can't even fit systemd into memory and thus using it is not an option.
So, udev in response was forked to eudev by other developers who now have to spend time and money on maintaining this fork and porting udev changes to it.
Loosely coupled is better because it allows one to be use without the other if there be such a need; tight coupling is essentially a form of product tying.
Why is it better that one can use an iPhone on any computer? rather than only computers designed by Apple?
> Everyone seems to hate journald. I'll go ahead and join in the chorus and say that it sounds really bad. But do we have to throw the baby out with the bath water? What else about systemd is actually worse than what we had before?
Many call for logind to replace acpid; — I strongly object to this and the difference in functionality between both highlights well the difference in philosophy between traditional Unix design and Lennart's brand.
acpid responds to acpi events by calling an executable file with a specific path; for instance `/etc/acpi/actions/powerbtn.sh` is called with arguments that describe the nature of the event when the power button is pressed. logind on the other hand simply allows for a limited list of I believe seven options in a configuration file of what to do when the power button is pressed, not an arbitrary file to be executed.
The possibilities of acpid are obviously limitless, and I use them as such. My machine is configured such that when I close my notebook's lid, the machine does not suspend, but rather disables the screen and goes into power-safe mode, but otherwise continues to operate, I can override this behavior by simply creating the file `/run/lid.disable`.
I cannot configure my machine to be so flexible with logind which highlights the difference in culture: Traditional Unix design was always about removing restrictions, and this is about providing features, but when the feature one seeks not be provided, then one is out of luck.