[jude-]

> OpenRC isn't really a replacement for sysvinit; rather it bolts on some functionality on top of sysvinit. My understanding is that OpenRC is not an incredibly mature codebase and would have needed a lot of work to come up to feature/stability parity with systemd.

It's not the goal of OpenRC to be a systemd replacement either. In fact, I don't think it's the goal of any init system to be a systemd replacement, except for uselessd (please correct me if I'm wrong).

OpenRC solves some of the bigger problems that systemd solves--namely, reliable process tracking, cleaner init scripts, user-defined targets, parallel service startup/shutdown, etc. Moreover, most of the above features are optional, and the system exposes most of its runtime state through the filesystem instead of DBus (so you can inspect it however you want with whatever tools you want). As an added bonus, it's portable.

It's really a pity that the Debian TC didn't look at it closely back during the init system vote, but to be fair, OpenRC's Debian integration was a work-in-progress at the time (I'm pleased to say it runs without problems on my Debian subnotebook).