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Comment by pwdisswordfish8 | Hacker News Reader

> On my Debian system it ships 50+ different binaries split across 8 different packages.

Nobody cares. The number of binaries is irrelevant. What is relevant are stable, documented interfaces between them that someone else could implement if they so choose and remain compatible. And systemd people have repeatedly said they do not intend to maintain stable interfaces between the various components of systemd. As long as that's true, it's completely fair to call systemd a monolith, 50+ binaries or not.

In other words, this is a ‘only Microsoft employees may use the secret 7 on the dice’ situation.

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What's really relevant is market share. Guess what? Systemd is winning because it massively sucks less than what existed before it.

No, it's winning because RedHat is forcing everyone's hand by hiring most of Linux desktop developers, and the rest are insufficient to maintain other solutions to keep feature parity.

It's Embrace Extend Extinguish in action, except by using the force of running two biggest distributions in addition to GNOME project. (And a bunch of others depending directly on them.) Even Debian was unable to weather all the dependencies using the new interfaces. Gentoo tries still with OpenRC, more or less successfully.

I don't think Red Hat are forcing anyone's hand. I think the fact that Red Hat are hiring passionate developers to work on something they love full time is something they should be lauded for. Of course Red Hat have to pick a project they're going to focus on, they can't focus on every implementation, and it only makes sense that community projects aren't going to have feature parity with software that's being built for enterprise use cases, worked on people whose it's their full time job. It's because of the wider support that the majority of distros decided to go with them.

That is incorrect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23067431

Your own comment that you've linked here, which mentions Russ Allbery, has him quoted saying, "Most of those [systemd] components are clearly superior to anything we have available now on Linux platforms and will be used in the distribution going forward".

Then there's Fedora, which is upstream of Red Hat, who has many of it's contributors as Red Hat employees, so I don't see how it's odd that they would adopt software that Red Hat are invested in.

Are you just going to ignore the evidence that goes counter to the narrative you want to establish?

I'm not intentionally ignoring any evidence, so I invite you to elaborate on what you're alluding to.

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