I watched this a few weeks ago as well, and it is a very good, even-handed overview of systemd. He talks about the history and other tools that came before, like Apple's `launchd` and Ubuntu's `upstart`. He also talks about the actual problems with it, rather than the FUD hysteria (and also explains why some of them are FUD).

He's from the BSD world, so his POV is as an (mostly) outsider.

You might be interested in these:

* https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/

* https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/

* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

I love this video and have to share it every time I see this debate. He really show how this argument is kind of weak and this is coming from a BSD guy!

This is a great talk, and helped change my stance on systemd from bad to neutral.

I watched the video a few moths ago. I disagree with almost everything this guy said.

I'm interested in which points you disagree, because I, in the opposite, agree with almost everything the guy said.

> there is a tragedy

Systemd was criticizes right from the start for the same things that it is criticized now. No misunderstanding. No bad timing. No tragedy present.

> People don't like change

Wrong! People love change if it is an improvement. People don't like change if things get worse.

> Services, System configuration, daemons, etc are separate distinct things and need distinct C code to be managed

Nope. They are essentially the same thing and should be dealt with by small scripts.

> It does not really violate the Unix philosophy

Nobody really knows what "Unix philosophy" actually is. Therefore it does not matter if it gets "violated". However systemd definitely violates my and many others taste for good software. It is bad taste.

> It's not bloated and monolithic because it's not one binary

The stupidest argument ever. If you have a lot of tightly interdependent binaries that don't make any sense to exist outside of systemd you have a monolithic system were simple nuclear parts are not replaceable with alternatives. Besides from that: Its f*in bloated as hell.

> It's not as buggy as people claim

It is. Besides, the real problem is not the number of bugs, the prolem is getting rid of bugs. Recompiling C code just to get your init working is really a world of nightmares.

> People don't like systemd because they don't like Lennard Poettering

Most only care about technology and systemd is bad technology. Nobody cares about Poettering.

> UNIX is dead

Hearing that coming from a FreeBSD developer? Do his BSD buddy's agree? Why doesn't he switch to Windows? Sounds like conman to me. Remind me to never install FreeBSD. A big part of what made Linux great are the things that were borrowed from Unix and Plan9.

To make it short: The dude loves change and he wants FreeBSD to go in the direction of what Windows is today. I love change and I want Linux to go into the direction of Plan9.

None of those are arguments, they're just "nuh-uhs".

Basically, people don't like systemd because they don't like change, and groups like shitting on other groups of people?

I'm not sure the presenter is condescending enough. Maybe he should have given an abbreviated history of Unix as well, oh wait, he did that.

Change is good. Let's change away from systemd.

Come up with something demonstrably better then. Nobody is stopping you.

Why are you acting as if alternatives don't already exist?

Define an alternative. Most systemd alternatives do not concern themselves with post-boot event handling much, for example, which is a rather big part of modern systems. Most alternatives do not use a declarative style for unit definitions, which is a safer model being adopted by many other parts of Linux, including whole distros such as Nix. Things like Kubernetes have become popular for similar reasons.

Notepad.exe is also an alternative to Word, if the subset of functionality you're looking at is strictly text input.

"demonstrably better" ... there's a reason beyond entropy why a lot of distros decided to adopt SystemD. A talk linked to in another thread goes over a lot of this. TFA itself shows there are alternatives.

It's like arguing that KDE or Gnome shouldn't exist as options... nobody removed anyone's options. Don't like it, fork it.