Re:Linux md maintainer, Shaohua Li, has died
by JdeBP on Friday January 04, 2019 @08:35AM
(#18823871)
Indeed, although the thing that actually was "regular System V init" was partly replaced with a new service manager subsystem several years before Linux was even invented.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788974
The motivation for writing systemd, and what it was initially intended to replace, was upstart, the software that preceded systemd on both Ubuntu and Fedora. The idea that only van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd existed is a common fallacy.
* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488235)
Everyone was definitely not OK with sysV init. That was the problem. The distros extended it in various incompatible and not very good ways. Regular sysV init was OK for what it did but hardly anyone used it that way. Systemd was not a rewrite of sysV; it was its own thing.
The question of how to do stuff in a Unix like OS is still very much open, making systemd did not magically make the question go away.