[rektide]

This (creates a new APIs) I feel is very much at the root of many people's dislike. But it's also exactly what was most important for advancing star-nix.

Historically we've had very little for managing processes. Start stop restart is about all we get for public interfaces, and they all involve shelling out via system().

The entire rest of the computing world has gotten immensely rich and powerful and grown. It's grown because there have been APIs. OpenStack, AWS, Kubernetes- once other applications start depend on the API (as you say) things start getting really good and powerful. The API makes it usable, gives the thing having an API programmability.

Process management has not had a decent API until systemd. Now we can write programs that watch for units being started, watch for them failing. Everything, the whole world, suddenly has a consistent well integrated API. It's appalling to me that people would disfavor this, when the past has been a bunch of hand jammed /etc/init.d/ scripts with varying capabilities and little introspectability.

I agree that being non-Linux is absurd and unfortunate. There really can't be that much special sauce that was relied on. Umass-PLASMA group has systemgo which is an interesting alternative, imo. https://github.com/plasma-umass/systemgo