[insertcredit]

You are using logical fallacies in your argument.

First, not _everyone_ has adopted it (loaded language). Google, which controls the vast majority of Linux systems on the planet, has not. GNU has not. Others [1] have not.

Second, the critique against systemd is substantial and solid enough to stand on its own regardless of popularity. Popularity does not imply quality, you should read "Worse is better" by Richard Gabriel. Politics, network effects and an octopus-like architecture that imposes itself via ever-increasing interdependencies are reasonable explanations to systemd adoption. For a distribution provider or package maintainer, it has gotten to the point where it's easier to go along with systemd than try and fight it, since the latter option means extra work. This is really a sad state of affairs.

[1] http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

[adontz]

OK, my bad, I admit. Not everyone. Most.

Most popular distributions, because, let's make it clear: RedHat, Fedora, CoreOS, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora KDE, and all other members of these respected families will account for at least (data by different sources vary) 75% of all installations.

Octopus-like architecture cannot be argument why it was adopted in the first place. People don't like dropping familiar/stable tools. Also, it was not so octopus in the first version.

Politics and network effects sound to me like conspiracy theory. Sorry, but I really do not believe that there is someone so powerful to make RedHat, Debian, SUSE and Canonical, to name a few, to harm themselves in one and the same, very specific way.

Problems solved by systemd exist. Systemd was not the only project trying to solve these problems, it was most successful/adopted. There was upstart. Remember Upstart? So, honestly, just reverting back to SysV init is not an option, it's just burying your head in the sand. Systemd is not perfect. It never was. Just SysV is worse.

I look at http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_... and see that most arguments against systemd are either a) Ignore obvious fact, that systemd is not a single program, but suite of programs which play nice together and are optimized to exchange data in effective ways, keep configuration in similar manner, etc. You cannot compare systemd to initd, like you cannot compare Atom to nano. b) Simply nostalgic. c) Somewhat valid, but again, systemd is not perfect, it's just much better than SysV initd. That's why it was adopted, not because of politics.

[dane-pgp]

> I really do not believe that there is someone so powerful to make RedHat, Debian, SUSE and Canonical, to name a few, to harm themselves in one and the same, very specific way.

Let's go through these one by one then.

* RedHat could certainly have adopted it because they saw it as a way to take control of the development of a central piece of GNU/Linux software architecture. An init system is the one piece of software (other than a kernel) that you can't run two of at the same time on the same bare metal, so this is obviously a tempting piece of real estate to capture to provide a competitive advantage in a commoditised landscape.

* SUSE didn't want to be seen to be left behind with "old fashioned" sysvinit, and didn't have the resources to invest in their own competing init system, especially after Canonical had already thrown their own resources at Upstart. Siding with the RPM distro over the DEB based one was also an obvious choice.

* Debian had a contentious debate about which init system should be the default (and, in practice, after choosing systemd, the only) fully supported init system. The decision was placed in the hands of the Technical Committee, who were split down the middle between choosing systemd or Upstart. The tie was resolved by a single vote, that of the committee's chairman, Bdale Garbee:

https://lwn.net/Articles/585363/

He is, no doubt, an honourable man, but he is also a cheerleader for HPE:

https://www.linux.com/NEWS/LINUX-LEADER-BDALE-GARBEE-TOUTS-P...

despite SUSE being HPE's preferred Linux distro:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/sweet-suse-hpe-snags-itself-a-...

* Canonical (that is, Ubuntu) went with systemd shortly after the Debian vote, once it became clear that single-handedly supporting Upstart was an unsustainable option for the company, especially as packages were starting to add dependencies on systemd:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-linux-civil-war-ubuntu-t...

* With all these top tier distros succumbing to systemd, more and more packages started to depend on it as the init system, to the point that it became all but impossible for another distro to ship packages that didn't depend on systemd in its base system.

This is exactly the sort of slow creeping spread that systemd is notorious for, using the momentum gained from each small victory to help crush bigger and bigger targets, until it is unavoidable.

The worst part, though, is the historical revisionism, and the suggestion that everyone just accepted systemd and abandoned all the software it replaces, based purely on the merits of systemd. Most people had to accept systemd whether they liked it or not. systemd is not a "suite of programs which play nice together", it is a suite of programs which only play nicely together, and which bully all the other programs into submission, despite systemd's technical flaws.

[pas]

> GNU has not

GNU? GNU ... GNU what? I never heard of any ( https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html )

> Second, the critique against systemd is substantial and solid enough to stand on its own regardless of popularity.

Sure, just as the responses to those. And thus the trade off was/is acceptable to the maintainers of distros that eventually adopted systemd.

There are too many random shell scripts everywhere in the world (not just the Linux world), systemd's unit files are a big step in the right direction, even if their code and architecture is a dumpster fire (low level linux plumbing written in C is usually that).