https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo (The Tragedy of systemd) is an interesting talk on this topic from the view of someone (Benno Rice) in BSD land. Highly recommended.
EDIT: this is mentioned in the article, thanks koalacola
EDIT: this is mentioned in the article, thanks koalacola
Tacitly: most people don’t like launchd, but they don’t interact with it either. Find me a person who writes or debugs launchd plists and you’ll find that:
1. they’re quite rare
2. they don’t like launchd
launchd and systemd aren’t even comparable, one is part of a monolithic proprietary operating system and the other is an ecosystem that is semi-modular which lends itself strongly to being an entire layer of your computing experience (dubbed: “the system layer” by Lennart Poettering).
There is an element of “do it yourself” with Linux, which leads to people (especially people with entrenched knowledge) being wary of things that cannot be debugged easily- but launchd exists in an ecosystem where “take it to the store” is a legitimate fallback, and even if it weren’t there is a built in backup/restore system that literally restores the machine to its entire previous state.
Disregarding the proprietary or “creep”/complex discussion about systemd/launchd:
launchd is an init.
systemd is an ecosystem.
> [...]
> 2. they don’t like launchd
This is true in my case, although the main thing on my mind when I work with launchd my main complaint often boils down to 'I wish this were more like systemd'. IME, systemd has much nicer CLIs, more capabilities, clearer and more comprehensive documentation, more abundant examples, and more conveniences/less privileges required for per-user stuff. The simple INI format for systemd units is also a lot easier and nicer to deal with than the XML format that plists use, even though there's a lot of tooling around plists.
> even if it weren’t there is a built in backup/restore system that literally restores the machine to its entire previous state.
I get this for free on NixOS and it's really easy to get on other distros by plugging /etc/systemd into etckeeper, even without a snapshotting filesystem. (Plus many distros have backups via snapshots of CoW filesystems built in just like macOS does.)
> launchd and systemd aren’t even comparable, one is part of a monolithic proprietary operating system and the other is an ecosystem that is semi-modular which lends itself strongly to being an entire layer of your computing experience (dubbed: “the system layer” by Lennart Poettering).
Benno says literally all of this in his talk. He even has a diagram with the phrase 'system layer' up on a slide while he's talking about it. I just re-watched it yesterday. In case it's missing from the linux.conf.au version, which is the one linked to in the LWN article linked to by the OP, here's the earlier BSDCan version, which is what I rewatched yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY