Because Lennart has a lot of pull at Red Hat, and Red Hat has a lot of pull in the Linux community.

The BSDs have really straightforward to maintain init scripts. Mainly because all the boilerplate junk is hidden in sourced-in files. Runit takes a more advanced approach, but its service files are still simple scripts a few lines long. We don't need a reinvent-the-world solution like systemd to address the most complained about problems with init.

It was adopted because the maintainers of distributions like Debian examined the alternatives and decided that systemd was technically superior. For example, please see the analysis of systemd and upstart by Debian maintainer and then-Technical Committee member Russ Allbery: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2013/12/msg00234.html

> distributions like Debian

In fact, only Debian underwent that process. Ubuntu did not. Nor did Fedora.

The Arch process was very different.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11834348

Well in a sense Ubuntu did by proxy. A big proponent of systemd within Debian works for Canonical, and Canonical had already stated that if Debian switched they would switch.

After all, Ubuntu is basically for Debain what RHEL is for Fedora.

> Because Lennart has a lot of pull at Red Hat... We don't need a reinvent-the-world solution like systemd to address the most complained about problems with init.

You work in software right?

You never ever "just" replace a system with an improved feature-alike product, you go apeshit crazy with cool stuff you wanted for the past 5 years but couldn't get approved, until you run out of budget. Duh.

They're straightforward because they both do less and appeal to she'll scripting to get it done.

I specifically want Turing completeness out of my configuration languages.

At the rate they are adding and modifying stuff, i am sure we can turn service files touring complete soon enough...