Your average HN user doesn't see or particularly care that it makes things easier for distro maintainers, so it's much easier to push the corporate conspiracy angle than to accept that a lot of the hand-wringing takes huge amounts not-very-fun volunteer labor for granted.
As a (Debian) package maintainer for over a decade, this used to be a non-issue. They were write and forget. The average package was just some simple boilerplate.
Maybe the LSB stuff was awful; I never used it, and for that matter I can't think of a reason I would want to. It's the old FreeDesktop.org issue: it's a probably-interesting solution to a problem I just don't have.
1) run the last version of gnome that works without systemd
2) run a patched later version of gnome from another distro that works without systemd
3) don't use gnome, use a different desktop environment
4) fork/patch gnome and remove the dependency yourself
systemd can't take any of those away from you.
If the people actually working on gnome want to add another dependency to gnome, that's their business, is it not? It doesn't break the existing, pre-systemd versions of gnome.
> Indeed, one ought to observe that the most important consumers of an init system are not sysadmins and ops people as commonly believed, but rather distro maintainers. It is their laziness that determines the balance.
Users choose their distribution, ultimately. I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion there.
The article goes into detail about why there was a desire from some distro maintainers to switch to something else. (clean slate).
The reason I accused you of not reading the article is because it's very clear why systemd was adopted.
1) RH Made it, that doesn't automatically make it good, but there was a lot of posturing from the RH devs to get more things tied in to it under the guise of "all distros will use us eventually, they're already in the process of adopting us!"
2) There was a strong desire to get off of sysvinit, many alternatives had come and gone, though most had the desire to be backwards compatible, none could get any real traction, mostly because it was hacks on hacks. Upstart was promising but people didn't use it properly.
3) GNOME added a hard dependency. Small in isolation but then.
4) UDEV was made systemd-only. UDEV being something that underpins a lot of software. A fork was made (eudev) but that was only the beginning because krdb was next to be systemd only.
5) when it came time for Debian to talk about systemd as the last major upstream distribution (IE: one that sysadmins actually deploy and one that other distros are essentially variants of): it was not "systemd or alternatives" it was "how much systemd do we have to take to be able to support most software."
6) When your distro can't take a major desktop environment, that's a lot of points off of your distro.
--
People choose their distro, but their distro often chooses a distro.
If you're a business building your company, you don't trust Gentoo- you run it on RHEL, Debian or potentially Ubuntu these days.