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Comment by devnonymous | Hacker News Reader

One of the more sensible ^rants^ I've read against systemd (it is KISS for some weirdly convoluted definition of KISS). Too bad these naysayers are not/will not be taken seriously.

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The naysayers are taken seriously, but they're in the decision-making minority. Linux distro maintainers wanted to move on from SysV Init, and systemd looked promising. Just because the naysayers didn't get their way (and on some distros, they did) doesn't mean that their criticisms aren't noted.

Which distros? Slackware is the only near-mainstream Linux distro I know of that is even possibly not moving immediately to systemd, and even then, the Slackware folks have said that once it becomes too difficult to maintain upstream packages, they'll switch too. They're just being pragmatic about it.

I thought there were others in addition to Slackware, but that pretty much all the distros are jumping ship shows the naysayers don't have enough political oomph.

Those that has adopted systemd are either precursors for commercial distros, said commercial distros, or based of same.

The really early adopters seems to have been offshots of Fedora. And i do wonder if Debian was a holdout until systemd started sprouting containerization features, and Canonical (Ubuntu) was feeling the heat.

Gentoo by default prefers OpenRC over systemd, though you can chose which one you want while installing.

And gentoo had to jump through hoops (to the point of forking udev) to be able to continue to do so.

The whole systemd vs sysv back and forth is a smokescreen, because while sysv stops at init systemd continues on to cron, networking, sessions, dhcp, dns, /dev, and soon to be ttys etc.

And while the kernel is maintained under the rule that change do not break user space, systemd developers seem to do changes with a permanent "deal with it" meme.

http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#GNU.2FLi...

It's worth noting that "too difficult" is a very high bar for a distro that to this day has yet to implement things like PAM; if you want an authentication system more advanced than /etc/{password,shadow}, you'll need to compile PAM from source and install it manually (there might be a Slackbuild for it nowadays; I don't really remember).

"Linux distro maintainers wanted to move on from SysV Init"

LOL no. distro maintainers wanted to ship gnome, which was product tied to systemd. No systemd, no gnome, that simple.

Are you seriously saying that most distribution maintainers were happy with sysvinit?

For what is worth, all the Debian maintainers I know, even those who are not systemd supporters, felt that sysvinit had to go in a way or the other (eg. during the default init debate the options were systemd and Upstart, sysvint was doomed to be replaced and only kept as a compatibility option in any case.)

Perhaps you could benefit from reading what some of the people making these decisions have written on the topic.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=1729;bug=7...

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

Agreed --- this is the first rant against systemd I've seen that didn't talk about Lennart at all, and the first one from which I've ever learned anything. It's a great example of how people ought to argue on the internet. While I find that systemd is great for my purposes, there's plenty of room on the internet for Steven and the BSDs.

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