Before anything else, I would like to say that I admit systemd has brought great change to GNU/Linux. sysvinit wasn’t the best, and custom scripts for every distro is a pain I’d rather not have.

With that said, Poettering now works for Microsoft, systemd has basically taken over all of the common/popular distributions (if this is about the argument of “systemd making it easier for developers”, disclaimer: I don’t know. I’m not a developer), and this has led to a rampant monopolisation of the init system.

Memes aside, this has very real consequences. If you don’t want another CentOS-style “oof, sorry, off to testing” debacle happening with your init system, might want to look at the more “advanced” distributions that let you choose the init system.

I am well aware that systemd works well for the most part, and that gamers and most other people likely don’t care - which is fine, at least for now. I do expect to see a massive turnover in sentiment if something ever happens to systemd (not that I’d like for that to happen, but no trusting RedHat anymore), but I suppose we’ll get to it when we do.

My sentiments are well enunciated in this recent post on the Devuan forum: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5826

Cheers!

      • Alex@feddit.ro
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        The person I replied to said that it’s really easy to change the kernels on distros, but hard to change the init system from systemd. However, most custom kernels on distros are just Linux with patches, but the core functionality and API are mostly the same. I’m pretty sure it would be easy to change the init system to a fork of systemd with some extra patches.

        I don’t have any issue with other init systems, the only reason I use systemd is because NixOS was built to use it.