As a Linux normie, I've never understood why systemd is/was so much opinioned about.
Systemd the init service is excellent.
Systemd the catch all for trying to rewrite all services to come up with a baseline version of everything is a strange and NIH project. They would have been far better off politically by coming up with a spec and seeing if they could submit patches to get the current services to use the APIs they were planning.
Instead they just have a bundle of things they have tried to reinvent, some more successfully than others. Hence the divisions in the communities.
When it's not actively going against decades of convention and breaking solid programs everyone has used forever: https://superuser.com/questions/1372963/how-do-i-keep-system...
(screen was also affected, not just tmux)
I'm not sure if it was linked from there, but somewhere in the discussions the systemd devs' recommended fix was for screen/tmux/anything else affected to add some systemd integration for their new API.
As far as I'm aware the complaints about this stopped only because distros override the setting, while it's still the default for stock systemd.
Systemd the init didn't do any of this. This is systemd-logind that is doing this.
Conflating multiple projects with the same name is a terrible idea.
Jump forward to systemd and absolutely none of trust Poettering farther than we can throw him. At the same time systemd basically did the job of half a dozen programs which offends a lot of people on philosophical grounds. Simultaneously a bunch of things start hard requiring this program that people neither trust nor like.
I don't know about the philosophical aspects, but from pure technical point of view systemd brought some order into the mess. Before systemd it seemed like most distros were barely holding together with duct tape. Systemd standardized a lot of things.
I am fine with a little bit of controversy if the result is a much better desktop OS experience for the user. And as a relatively long time Linux user, I can certainly say it is much better now than it was 20 years ago.
Also having a bunch of things barely held together with duct tape is part of the philosophy.
Yes, I'm very happy that it mutes my audio when I accidentally unplug my headphones (something which I never asked for) and then often fails to unmute them when plugging them back in, something which requires digging up alsamixer to fix because pulse/pipeware-based GUI tools are being lied to about the output not being muted.
I'm also especially fond of having to open the audio settings app to change audio from one display output to another because some very smart person decided to group all display audio (which are separate ALSA sinks) into one output with different profiles.
But lets not forget that it at least simplified configuration. So much that GUI tools basically don't let you configure shit at all and you need to use one of two (yes, one was not enough) turing-complete configuration languages to accomplish anything slightly non-standard like giving outputs are better name than what your display manufactures cat produced while walking over his keyboard or hiding some of the bazillion useless audio devices that you might end up with somewhere in your PC.
And then of course it still has the PA-innovations like audio randomly stopping for no reason at all until you restart the daemon.
Meanwhile ALSA with an up to date default dmix configuration worked just fine.
Before that I did have custom config, it was not that hard to set up, there are great examples and explanations on Arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire
That's fine for basic audio but completely excludes any higher demand application, including high quality A/V sync. Best you can do is work around and best effort guess.
* I do remember reading there was one feature they intentionally dropped because it was extremely rarely useful and could be handled in a different way, but don't remember what it was.
But it absolutely doesn't follow from that that pulseaudio was somehow bad. There was more than a decade where audio drivers were slowly getting bug fixes to get to a state where they are working okay for the most part. Pipewire would have experienced many of the same issues as pulseaudio, and we would similarly attribute those errors incorrectly to the audio server.
And he complained about a lot of dependencies but then went and actually wrote fixes/solutions for them that was so good that nearly everyone started using and even depending on it.
It sounds like the people who were sitting on the sidelines complaining about his complaining had ample opportunities to write better alternatives than the programs he wrote but didn’t do so. Instead they relied on character attacks and FUD (well, except the folks who developed pipewire), while Poettering wa engage in elite hacking by implementing solutions and letting users and distro makers decide whether they wanted to use those solutions.
I don’t see how Poettering is the villain here.
Poettering seems to be good at politics. Where politics means having his way.
Not so much at writing working code, or interoperability.
A son of GDR diplomats, according to an old version of his Wikipedia page. That information seems to be memory-holed now. Now you only find that he grew up in South America without any hint of a reason.
Due to this design they often have underspecified interaction between the different components, since the assumption is that everyone will use largely the same baseline systemd environment and as long as it works, who cares what it does underneath. If the different parts were more independent, they would be forced to develop a cleaner API contract between them.
I had a nightmare last week wherein I read a headline that systemd was writing its own kernel. When I woke up I realized it was a possibility, after all it has replaced GRUB. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-boot
How? This is really where it's basically a marketing fail.
Even your own link for system-boot shows that it is it's own rebranding of gummi-boot. It's not part of the init system, they just have an identically named project which has 100 utilities in it. It's dumb and it's community hostile.
With unified kernel images there is no need for grub or any other bootloader anymore. And UKI simplifies boot configuration and helps improving security in some aspects.
And to be perfectly honest, it's nothing more than a philosophy - it's not some universal truth, e.g. a browser by definition is not doing "one small thing" and complex workloads are better organized by monolithic software to a certain degree.
It seems to me that the real differentiator is not the number of features but software release date :)
And as anyone could have expected, systemd broke a lot of things, and sometimes very badly with their shitty code. Like this time that they wiped the nvram memory of laptop transforming them into bricks...