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!
To be fair, every part of it is a small binary that generally does a single thing. You don’t have to run them all or even install them but they bring a lot of necessary functionality around base host bootstrapping that everyone used to write in shell for every distro.
I find it nice as an operators of multiple infrastructures to be able to log into a Linux system and have all the hosts bootstrapped in a relatively similar fashion with common tools.
Sysv kinda sucked because everyone had to do it all themselves. Then we got sysv, openrc, upstart and then systems and there was a while there where you never knew what you’d get if you logged into a box. And oh look, I gotta remember 10 different config file locations and syntaxes to assign an IP. Different syntaxes to start a daemon. Do I need to install a supervisor or does that come with the init.
People are doing a lot of really cool stuff with Linux OSs assigning IP addresses in 10 different ways or starting programs was never one of them.
Its also not that systemd has a monopoly, there are other init systems out there, but all the big distros, RH, Debian, ubuntu, arch . . . all came to the same decision that it was the best available init and adopted it. There are other options and any one of those projects is big enough to maintain its own init, but no one really finds the value in dedicating reaources, so they haven’t.