Can't these features be toggled?
But it's meant to work as a cohesive system when everything in systemd is used together.
FWIW, I think it's great that someone is trying to make a coherent set of system services for Linux. Things tend to interoperate better when they're explicitly written to work together than when every component is meant to be hacked to work with arbitrary other services through shell script soup.
Also it's interesting that a set of simple interfaces have worked for so long. Maybe they did something wrong that it didn't break?
That approach is part of why Valve has been able to ship Linux to general consumers.
I don't know exactly why you'd go for amutable specifically, but not handing users the key is a huge benefit to any company-owned hardware out there.
This enables the danger of locking out every Linux distribution out there, esp. with new IPC protocols, new image based installation methods, encryption and whatnot systemd brings in with all these modules.
One day, Microsoft can disallow disabling of secure-boot for PC certification and stop signing 3rd party bootloaders. The rest will be fun.
I don't really get it. If you don't want systemd, you can install your own OpenRC-based immutable OS. I don't know if that currently exists (Android does, I suppose? maybe ChromeOS?) but it's not like systemd is forbidding everyone from doing anything.
The biggest difference between systemd and alternatives is that systemd builds out the architecture that makes things like building immutable distros easy. If you have a thousand different components, all with slightly different roles, the amount of coordination necessary to get everything to play nice together makes it near impossible to achieve the same things a coordinated system can achieve.
I'm sure that if someone would build an alternative to systemd-sysext and prepare a prebuilt set of tooling and configuration that does what systemd does, there will be distros that will use them.
Secure boot can be overridden by just adding your own keys. At worst, Microsoft will refuse to boot Windows because you added a key yourself. The exception is extra expensive, specially labeled Enterprime (TM) hardware built for Windows sysadmins and Microsoft tablets built for consumers, but I don't know why you'd buy either if you don't want to give MS that much control.
I know they've attached all these projects to the systemd brand because they thought it would beneficial but it's hard not to wonder if we could avoid all those discussions if the umbrella project was called something different...
I would probably run systemd-journald just because it's really nice to have a logging system which knows about the system services, but it's not required.