Jupiter Broadcasting are an unreliable source, to say the least. I did watch that episode. When you use such pristine arguments as "Someone reimplemented systemd's D-Bus APIs, therefore systemd is portable!" (much like the Windows API is portable, because Wine exists) and claim that systemd is a "manufactured controversy" while responding to easy straw man arguments, there is a term for that kind of person: a shill.

I was also very amused by the Linux Action Show's coverage of uselessd. They spent the entire time whining about the name, thinking it makes fun of the systemd developers, when in fact it's making fun of ourselves. They also got mad over the use of the word "cruft" and later called us "butthurt BSD users".

Good to see that you bring some new insights, however. Very mature and enlightening.

"Hey, everybody, look at all the people using systemd! They must know better than you, so shut the fuck up and use whatever you want - no one is stopping you! By the way, systemd is meant for servers, even though the developers have never said anything like that and have made it clear that it's meant for all use cases."

In this regard, you are little more than a troll. Or a person who thinks popularity means quality. Both, even.

Which is totally ironic too in that the server-admins hate it. (speaking just for myself here=) )

I am a sysadmin of a medium sized data-center. I am in charge of 100-150 servers at any given point. None of the changes that systemd 'fixes' benefit me or my systems. Boot times? What's the point when it takes 10-minutes for the drive-arrays to spin-up? Logging? I pray a system never dies and I have to access those rotten binary log-files from a live-cd. Network changes/configuration? Nope, every server is configured with static network configs. Power Management? Ha! That's funny. Downtime in minutes costs more then electricity does in a a month.

I could go on. But there is one major caveat: As a laptop user, systemd is fantastic.

As my Debian servers need to and/or get updated and start requiring systemd then I will just migrate them to OpenBSD. This process has already begun.

Systemd is changing things for the wrong group of people. Mobile/Desktop users have alot of wiggle room and areas that need improvement. Server admins need stability; in software, hardware, (script) syntaxes, and interfaces. Users need everything that systemd offers.

I will concede that systemd might be a good fit with Docker, and I am looking into that too; but I guarantee you it will be on it's own box and not homogeneous with the rest of my network.

Ran into a recent interview where he kept referring back to the OSX sound system when talking about Pulseaudio, and Avahi is zeroconf/bonjour. And with Systemd he constantly makes references to Launchd, the OSX "init".

BTW, Red Hat just now announced that the future of the company would be Openstack and the cloud. Fits perfectly with the push for containerization in Systemd.

More and more i get the impression that the "developers" mentioned as benefiting from Systemd are the likes of the Reddit crew. Reddit pretty much could not exist without Amazon's cloud services.

Meaning that for Poettering the future is two things, cloud computing and cloning OSX. And given the number of web monkeys that seems to sport a Mac, i am not surprised at all.

I just wish that they could avoid infecting the rest of the Linux environment...

This statement, "systemd isn't final - it's software, and will come and go.", is the one that most captures my angst. And you can replace 'systemd' with 'linux' or 'gstreamer' or 'webkit' or 'gcc' or 'fsck' for that matter. Not only are they not 'final' but what they would be able to do if they were 'final' is left unspecified. That puts the system on the DAG equivalent of a drunken walk. And users don't seem to like it when their systems are evolving randomly.

I really enjoyed the early RFC process of the IETF because we could argue over what was and was not the responsibility for a protocol, what it had to do and what was optional, and what it would achieve when it was 'done.' Then people compared what they had coded up. When the architecture is the code and the code is the spec, my experience is that sometimes we lose track of where it was we were going in the first place.

I think systemd has a lot going for it, and it's been pretty stable on my Arch notebook, but I'm not too thrilled with the way it takes over so many tasks at once and eschews text log files. What's frustrating is that I didn't have much choice in the matter. Yeah, I could switch to another distro, but since Red Hat, Suse, and now Debian and Ubuntu are switching to systemd, that leaves Gentoo or BSD or something. Which are perfectly fine in their own right, but that's pretty drastic if I just want to avoid systemd.

With so many heavyweight linux enterprise companies jumping on systemd, one must wonder what consideration they have given the issue? I'd wager, a lot. Also, note that systemd is really designed with servers in mind, so it's not surprising for a desktop/laptop distro user to find it bothersome (it wasn't designed with your use-case in mind). With that said, the beauty of Arch is you can yank systemd out and go with whatever init system you desire.

As for the Systemd design. I Think it started with Poettering drooling over OSX Launchd (his other projects also seem to be straight OSX feature clones), that since then has been hitched on the cloud computing push within RH.

In essence, the kind of server that Systemd seems to favor are cloud computing instances where storage and networking can come and go as the back end gets configured for new needs.

Traditional static big iron and clusters don't really benefit much from the "adaptive" nature of Systemd. If those breaks they usually have a hot reserve taking over while the admins get to work figuring out what broke.