[awilfox]

This has more to do with systemd trying to be a "system layer" project for Linux, and influential projects (initially Gnome, then KDE, and now a lot of other things) going along with it.

Honestly, I see no reason a distribution couldn't support multiple service managers. Indeed, Gentoo officially support OpenRC and systemd and do just fine. However, you need to have the resources to do it and the desire. I think there are multiple distributions with one or the other, but Gentoo is likely the only with both.

[einpoklum]

> However, you need to have the resources to do it and the desire.

If resources were lacking to offer both regular and systemd-based init and service management, than a systemd offering should have been deferred until such time when resources become available, or different projects did some work of their own to reduce the amount of necessary resources. Offering multiple other init/service management options apparently doesn't require many resources.

(Of course, they could have saved a lot of resources by dropping GNOME until the GNOME people started being civil and not hard-depend on systemd... but I realize that's a bit of a controversial suggestion :-P )

[throwaway7356]

> systemd offering should have been deferred until such time when resources become available

Why would you delay adoption of a technical superior solution if there is no interested/lack of resources in continuing maintenance of the inferior solution?

Distributions did not stop adopting Python 3 and invested in continuing Python 2 either.

[einpoklum]

> Why would you delay adoption of a technical superior solution if there is no interested/lack of resources in continuing maintenance of the inferior solution?

But a technically superior solution was not on the table to become the default, the suggestion was to use systemd and effectively prevent the use of anything else (including potentially technically superior solutions).