[jchw]

I don't think most people want to hold back progress, but it is alarming how difficult it is to remove systemd from modern Linux stacks. We went from having a choice of many init systems to virtually no choice at all.

To me it seems like a repeat of X11: many proprietary interfaces to a complicated blackbox that handles nearly an operating system's worth of functionality. I'm not pro-UNIX-way or any kind of purist, but I've seen how this pans out before and it seems unlikely to work out well in the long-term future.

My preferred future is one where the protocols for communicating with an init system are open, efficient, and replaceable. libc defines a standard interface between user space and kernel mode (...sort of, anyways) and I want to see similar stuff for various parts of the system, like controlling power or authenticating sessions and so forth.