[dralley]

The systemd init isn't half an operating system any more than the coreutils "ls" utility is half a userspace. The systemd project has many different components but they're independent, they are not all literally part of the init system.

[einpoklum]

You're the one who brought up init systems. Like you said, systemd is a huge project; an init system is just one of its components.

> he systemd project has many different components but they're independent

They _are_ dependent. It's one codebas, and even if you somehow separated it - you would still only have systemd-specific, systemd-dependent replacements for _actual_ independent components.

They all depend on systemd and won't work with anything else, nor on any other operating system either.

[dralley]

This is the post I responded to

>> The proof this site is misnamed is that a post criticizing systemd gets downvoted, probably by people who have never questioned why an [[ init system ]] needs to become half the operating system.

So no, I didn't bring it up.

I find the whole argument kind of dumb anyway. People talk about this as if it was a violation of the "Unix Philosophy" when Unix and BSD are developed even moreso in the same way - the init system is sitting in the same repo as the libc, the kernel, and the entire rest of the OS. Linux is alone amongst operating systems in making core system components swappable like to that degree in the first place. It's fine to like that kind of flexibility, but a bit silly to act as though that approach is fundamentally superior. If you want to use non-systemd tools, use a non-systemd distro, that is your choice. Just quit whining about 99.9999% of the other software users on the planet not catering to it.

[einpoklum]

> If you want to use non-systemd tools, use a non-systemd distro, that is your choice.

No, it is not my choice, because I'm not talking about my PC at home, but rather what organizations use - commercial companies, universities, schools, NGOs etc. And also what users are taught to handle and work with.

But it's not even that: I want systemd to be _dropped_ as a default part of the main Linux distributions. I want only the people who explicitly prefer systemd, to use systemd, and not the rest.

As for the "dumb argument" etc. - what you're saying is that because the different BSD distros are monolithic, then not only should Linux become that way, but - all of the lower-level Linux userspace, above the kernel, should just be handed over to the benevolent oligarchy of the systemd people.

That's a bad idea, both in principle, and also in practice, due to the innumerable problematic design and implementation choices systemd has taken - which developers and sysadmins/power-users did not mandate, agree to or support.

[c-hendricks]

> No, it is not my choice, because I'm not talking about my PC at home, but rather what organizations use - commercial companies, universities, schools, NGOs etc

How much of a say do you have over the minutiae choices of various organizations anyways?

> I want only the people who explicitly prefer systemd, to use systemd, and not the rest

And some those people that prefer systemd happen to have a lot of influence on the choices for what init system a distro uses.

Maybe we could build something that lets us convert between different init systems to ease the maintenance burden. We'd need a structured format to start from, I wonder what options are out there...