> What I don't understand is how the vast majority of the Linux community is not just allowing, but encouraging, systemd to continue to grow without bound.

The vast majority of the Linux community has no influence on the development of systemd and its cloud of closely related software. What's more, Poettering & co. are notoriously opinionated and bullheaded. This makes attempts to steer "their" projects in new directions all but impossible.

If Debian had moved from SysV init to -say- OpenRC, systemd would be a strictly RedHat curiosity. [0] If my experience with Kubuntu 15.04 is typical [1], we might see some pushback from -at a minimum- Canonical.

The Linux kernel hackers asked some serious technical questions about kdbus (another Poettering Cabal project) back during the 4.1 merge window. The answers that they got back were less than satisfying. I haven't been following the kdbus project closely since then, but AIUI, the objections raised have yet to be addressed.

[0] It's a pity that that conversation was not on my radar when it first started; I would have loved to get up to speed on OpenRC and attempt to address the Debian folks' concerns with it!

[1] Systemd boot times are 2->10x slower than boot times with Upstart (and the systemd boot time reporting software provides incorrect numbers), and systemd system shutdowns occasionally hang forever, requiring the use of SysRq key combos to kill the machine.

You can't argue with Poettering. He writes technically superior solutions for extremely edge-case problems and then markets them fiercely, dismissing people as stupid if they prefer the caveman's way [e.g. UNIX]. To disagree is to say you prefer a kludgy unintelligent mess. Which, we do. But you don't win points in a feature-comparison pissing contest for that.

Theo is basically who Poettering would be if he forked Linux (and was less whiny). He probably hasn't because it would be a ton of work and few people would use it, and he couldn't benefit from the base of support of the Linux ecosystem. There's a lot of crap out there that's Linux-only now, or officially only supports certain distros. It makes much more sense to convince someone to shoehorn your code into their distro than to make your own.

Few desktop users ever notice it, most server admins aren't really that knowledgeable, and most devs just write userland code. I think most people don't think about how much more of a headache things have become. After all, hasn't Linux/UNIX always been a headache, relatively speaking?

> Theo is basically who Poettering would be if he forked Linux (and was less whiny).

These personal insults make it difficult for people to take the anti-systemd crowd seriously.

Torvalds could have been such an asshole for Linux, but he is adamant to not look outside of the kernel. As such, Poettering, Sievers, and the rest are doing an envelopment and containment move by basically building a second kernel in userspace. They also seem to have managed to get a friendly ear on the inside in the form of GregKH. A person that Torvalds seems to place a bit too much trust in these days.

> What I don't understand is how the vast majority of the Linux community is not just allowing, but encouraging, systemd to continue to grow without bound.

Red Hat revenue FY2015: $1.79 billion

They can allocate developers to systemd far, far beyond the capability for any other Linux organisation or group who might be developing an alternative approach.

Basically steamrollering systemd into the GNU / Linux environment.

It used to be I ran Linux and was unhappy that it didn't cover 100% of the functionality I could get in Windows. then they started approaching parity and I came to terms with not being able to do everything. Now I run OpenBSD on my laptop and it doesn't cover 100% of the functionality I could get in Linux (which was just reaching Parity with Windows for my uses.) But I already learned to be OK not being able to do every single thing. A generation comes and a generation goes, but the earth abides forever.