https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdWhyItW...> The reason systemd has succeeded in becoming an SysV init replacement is simple: it did the work. Not only did it put together a lot of good ideas regardless of their novelty or lack thereof but its developers put in the time and effort to convince people that it was a good idea, the right answer, a good solution to problems and so on. Then they dealt with lots and lots of practical concerns, backwards compatibility, corner cases, endless arguments, and so on and so forth. I want to specifically mention here that one of the things the systemd people did was write extensive documentation on systemd's design, how to configure and operate it, and what sorts of neat things you can do with it. While this documentation is not perfect, most init systems are an order of magnitude less well documented.
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> You can call this marketing if you want, although I don't think that that's a useful label for what is really happening. I call this 'trying' versus 'not trying'. If you don't try hard and work hard to become a replacement init system, it should be no surprise when you don't.
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> Since that may not be clear, let me be plain: systemd is a better init system than the alternatives. It does more to solve real problems and it does it better. That alone is a good reason for it to win in the practical world, the one where people care about getting stuff done. That systemd is not necessarily novel or the first to come up with the ideas that it embodies is irrelevant to this. Implementation matters more than ideas.