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by cr0sh 2503 days ago
From my understanding, and I may be wrong, the reason why systemd is..."controversial"...had mainly to do with the heavy-handed way it was incorporated.

It was almost like it appeared out of nowhere, written by one person who "thought he knew better" (maybe he did? but that's not the point), without any community input or discussion, and yet despite all of this somehow it got crammed into a distro (I don't recall which) - in what seemed to be an almost unilateral manner. A "my way or the highway" attitude of sorts.

It smacks of the whole "rockstar coder" mentality, where you have one guy on the team who forces everything to be his way, and he's begrudgingly recognised as probably right, and good for his work - but you still feel slighted as not having input on anything, because you're supposed to be a team (or a community).

What I really don't understand is how systemd has been so "infectious" - it seems like every distro is or has switched over to it...

...whereas init was (from what I know) more organic in how it came about, which might also explain its warts and other pitfalls that systemd supposedly addresses. I haven't been so deep in the weeds of linux to really understand all of the arguments of this nature; while I sympathise with the init crowd, I am but mostly a mere user of the system, who occasionally throws on an admin hat, but has found over time this has become less of a need for me to do (ah, for the olden days of Turbo Linux 2.0 and kernel recompiling - though my first Linux experience was via Monkey).

Had he introduced it in such a way to promote a discussion and dissemination of his ideas, maybe it wouldn't have turned out to be exactly like it is today, but it might have been more accepted (and maybe not as monolithic as I understand systemd to be - maybe it would have been more akin to a hybrid between his ideas and init?).

1 comments

SysV init, which was the traditional type used on Linux systems (with some exceptions like Slackware), was itself derided by critics as overcomplicated. And since it was part of the commercial distribution of UNIX released by AT&T, it was viewed by many as corporate contamination. Not "organic" at all. The BSD world never accepted it.