this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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systemd controversy was never about purism. It was about some piece of software unasked for by the majority of users, including absolute majority of desktop users, being pushed with juvenile means and those disliking that being called words like "luddite".
It still is, believe me or not, I probably wouldn't find anything wrong in systemd (or pulseaudio, or Gnome 3) were it not pushed with that arrogant Apple or MS like approach of "we've rolled out this new feature in our system, and you're a weirdo".
Same reason I liked the very theoretical idea of something like Wayland, but Wayland itself I don't want to even try. Except for the possibility of something like CWM existing for it, that I can set up in 15 minutes with 20 lines of config file without levels of brackets etc (there is actual research as to how many levels various primates can process, chimps can't go above 3, and I'm apparently as intelligent as a chimp, because neither can I in practice, but so is Linus Torvalds with his famous quote about more than 3 levels of indentation ; the issue is that I don't want to strain my mind with that either when with a few X11 window managers I don't have to). There's none I've found yet.
Their politics trouble me. The technical parts may be sometimes arguable, but what isn't, our world is created with mistakes as building blocks. But I've started using Unix-like systems for the feeling of freedom and patience, and while RH stuff doesn't take away the former, it infringes on the latter.
While I agree with the politics part (especially the notorious suspend-then-hibernate thing), I do see why a lot of devs would ask for systemd-init: to just bundle 1 kind of service instead of a gazillion. Same thing with Flatpak and not needing to build a gazillion binaries for every distro that hasn't packaged you, even though FLatpak's sandboxing away from native libraries is something I just don't like.
How would that work? There were N init systems with one "main" one, now there are N+1 init systems with one "main" one, just different.
Anyway, init systems for developers being problematic seem for me a nonexistent problem. Writing a systemd unit takes less time than writing this comment with tea and buckwheat with milk as a distraction. Writing a sysvinit script takes something like that too. Same with BSD inits. Same with openrc.
While combined they take some time, packagers can do that. And even if they can't, time spent trying to persuade others that systemd makes things easier is orders of magnitude bigger than time spent writing service scripts\templates\units.