| I claim init systems shouldn't open network connections. Sure, bind has a terrible security record, and that was part of the reason why people started writing more secure replacements like unbound. NTP has a terrible security record, and that's part of the reason people started writing more small secure replacements like NTPsec and chrony. Similarly sendmail's security issues resulted in improvements like postfix, which hasn't been swallowed into system yet, mostly kidding. Linux often has multiple implementations for a given service and ease of use, performance, security and related allows them to compete. This is a sign of a healthy ecosystem and generally I think it's working well. However systemd, by rolling this functionality into systemd subverts that system and the vast majority of systems will just accept the defaults. It also makes systemd huge and complex, last I looked there was somewhere around 5% of the lines of code in systemd than the entire linux kernel which I find scary. |
Second, systemd does not mandate using any of these components apart from `journald` and `logind`. You can pipe journald into any syslog daemon of your choice, there's a config option to do so. If you've got issues with logind I can't help you there. I don't know what it was intended to replace (consolekit, I think?) but I do remember it was badly maintained.
Third, a vast majority of deployments do _not_ accept defaults. I know that both Red Hat and Debian go for third party network managers (networkmanager and Debian's ifup/ifdown stuff) and rsyslogd was there on a default install of both Debian Buster and CentOS 8 iirc.
Finally, I repeat, systemd is a monorepo which contains many programs. Sure, you can argue about how they're tightly bound, but I can point you towards FreeBSD/OpenBSD if you'd want them to be broken up into separate repos to be more "unix-y", and if you look at systemd PID1 it's a fairly small binary which doesn't seem to offer many security holes.