The motivation behind systemd (2018)

1) Support Gentoo, Alpine and *BSD, especially with code and/or donations.

2) Support alternatives such as sysvinit, openrc, eudev with code and/or donations.

3) Support minimalist and console userspace software such as busybox, sysvinit, feh, fbpdf, support window managers that are still independent of *kit, support any platforms that big tech have no use of.

4) Encourage projects to stay independent of systemd, udev and, if possible, dbus too, although the dbus and udev battles are practically lost at this point.

5) Watch out for new dependencies being added to important projects such as xorg, gtk, qt, mesa, etc. and actively resist/oppose them.

6) Contribute to libraries that fake systemd/udev/dbus presence in a system and allow compiling dependent packages without actually having those packages installed.

7) Support mentainance of linux console! Fight to keep stuff such as scrollback buffer in the linux kernel.

8) If you really have lots of time, contribute to alternatives that sabotage big tech, such as ReactOS, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc.

  And most importantly,

9) When you make a new website, support basic browsers without javascript (links, lynx, dillo, netsurf).

10) When you make a new app, make it available as a download outside of a OS shop/market app.

This is why more competition like System76 is important in Linux space. GNOME is pretty much a corporate controlled GUI. It sucks so much if you want to do anything advanced or productive (I use GNOME by the way). That is why I am excited for projects like COSMIC, Nix etc.

Edit: My point is not that systemd is bad. I personally haven't had any issues with systemd. I would just like more competition to companies like RedHat so they don't end up controlling our computing like Microsoft and Google did.

The article doesn't mention this: systemd is not well written software, and far from behaving robust and consistently. Take some time, look through the currently open issues on Github, see for yourself whether you consider this stable software. Machine hanging indefinitely during poweroff/reboot is one of the classics.

I'm not saying that good software has no bugs, but the kind of bugs reported tells much about the software.

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues

This always ends up being a sore subject.

I don't want to tell anyone what to do.

The early fears of mission creep seem well founded to me. Among whatever wonders achieved by systemd, I'm personally disturbed by its increasing ubiquity. I was always extremely grateful for Linux and the many applications available. I also value consistency. I can't immediately name all the things that have changed, some better and some for worse, but Cron comes to mind, which I typically can't use on a systemd distro. Often, when looking up a forgotten command, it's now systemd or its cli interface systemctl that has replaced it. And I dread a situation where systemd and network-manger are my only options for wifi, which has been the case for me in opensuse, where connman, wpa-supplicant, iwd don't work and the good old days of making/etc/resolved immutable fail to preserve my DNS configuration. I know there are ways around this, but nothing easy so far for me.

Perhaps in the end it will all prove for the best. For now it seems systemd is eating Linux and without facetiousness, such distros could reasonably be renamed systemd-untu/ian/arch/etc.

I think the best course is to beat it back to where it was supposed to stay and restrain it there. Because I cannot predict the future and don't really know how all will unfold, I maintain two distros, one systemd and one openrc. This helps flatten the learning curve in the event systemd does eventually devour Linux, while allowing me to hold onto to something that is what seems, ie Linux - the creation that has been my stalwart companion for almost 20 years.

There is much I could say critical of systemd, but not with sufficient authority that it would be well received by either 'side'. I've read that, eg Debian, has made the endeavors if Devuan more onerous than would be expected by their original statements on the optionality of systemd. I've read a lot more, much that I don't fully understand and some that appears to make sense.

Foremost, it is the increasing pervasiveness of the beast that alarms me. It really is growing, and intended or not, dependencies are forming - and that's scheduled to be a problem.

Personally, I hope that others will hold out and support alternative distros, such as Alpine, Void, PCLinux, Gentoo, (Chimera?) and others, especially the standalone ones. Maybe systemd will consumate into something great, though I cannot presently foresee it.

The conspiracy I follow is systemd is the result of a bunch of noobs trying to duplicate the Mac experience on linux. Such as the focus on laptop over traditional multi-user systems. And a desire to minimize boot time.

See also, "wayland replaces X" for only the use cases tech bros know about.

A few thoughts as to why systemd is as tolerated as it is:

* Integrating systemd into Debian didn't cause any apparent disruption to the Debian release cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Sarge_and_later_release...). Meanwhile, according to TFA, forking Debian to keep not having systemd (when it already didn't) took longer than that release cycle, while starting most of the way through it. Any early adopters essentially missed an entire version.

* People who oppose systemd apparently would say things in 2018, and update them in 2023, like

> The latest invention by Lennart Poettering called systemd-homed is presented as a new way to handle home directories, whereas it really just is a way to get one step closer to eliminating /etc, which is something Red Hat has dreamed about for a long time.

while neither explaining why "eliminating /etc" would be a bad thing, nor evidencing such a "dream" (in an article that does evidence many other things), nor apparently noticing that /etc hadn't gone anywhere in those 5 years (and still hasn't - as I write this, there are nearly 2500 files recursively in my /etc). More generally, no explanation is forthcoming about how "development... [being] almost completely hijacked by major companies" has resulted in any actual harmful effect on the software.

The FOSS world had the choice to discriminate against corporate interests; instead, for years I listened to arguments about why I shouldn't be able to make my software et gratis et libre to hobbyists while charging a substantial fee to businesses, and about how this is incompatible with what they were trying to do (as explained by the OSI).

* Relatedly, the apparent evidence that "Red Hat wants to become the next Microsoft Windows" consists of systemd supposedly helping to "make desktop systems like GNOME function like Microsoft Windows.", and that Poettering wants Linux to be able to run on all hardware and not have "pointless differences between distributions".

If I need to think about which distribution I'm using, I think it's only fair for it to make meaningful differences; if I hop distros, why would I want to run into arbitrary and capricious road bumps?

As for GNOME, I have to wonder if the author has used that software. And again, I don't understand why it should be a bad thing if, e.g., Cinnamon provides a (vaguely) Windows-like UI. (Never mind that this is a case where the actual GNOME product had to be forked to actually "make it function like Microsoft Windows"!)

* End users are, in all likelihood, not running into the supposed issues with systemd as software (I haven't) while having a poor experience with a bunch of application-level stuff that gets very little support. (Speaking of GNOME - I especially have had a poor experience with their stuff. And one of the biggest reasons I'd consider switching away from Mint is to avoid the feeling of vendor lock-in I'm getting from it.)

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tl;dr: systemd opponents tend to come across to me as conspiracy theorists - legit, by-the-book definition ones, who allege a secret (albeit not that secret) plan by a group (Microsoft, RedHat, and collaborators at various other distros) to do something harmful. The problem is, they seem to be terrible at describing the harm they apparently see as self-evident, while paying less attention to other serious problems in the Linux world unrelated to systemd. That doesn't make their argument less valid, but it does make me very much less inclined to care about it.