Non-systemd systems seem very "hacker" to me. Bonus points for going against the grain and doing a project fewer people care about for the purpose of fulfilling esoteric software philosophies.

how can you tell what people care about?

The vast majority of unix/linux "media" are sponsored by a handful of industries that all "sell" systemd based distros. Who makes a living writing for a linux media outfit who will turn against the interests of those who pay his salary?

How do you know there is a choice for people if you don't know the amount of bias there is in media what to project as "mainstream" and "popular". When Distrowatch a little while ago, run a poll, about init systems, systemd DID NOT come 1st, and its 3-4 top adversaries got 60% of the votes. Based on this I'd say systemd is a little second class adversary that can only get newbs fooled to use it because that is what mass media tells them they should try.

Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Debian, Fedora. This is what media is pushing down peoples' throats.

Could someone explain it to me? I'm really out of the loop. I replaced Windows with Ubuntu a month ago with the intent to learn Linux. So far I have learned nothing: it's too stable and usable. Clearly something is being done correctly, and I did briefly have a stint with the older boot/service stuff in high school (which was impossible).

Some people don't like systemd because it rolls a bunch of other functionality beyond 'just init' into a giant monolithic beast. The advantage is that distro maintainers are able to present an extremely usable and stable system like Ubuntu, Arch or any of the other mainstream distros. For most people that just want to use their computer to do regular stuff like browse the internet and edit photos and stuff, systemd or otherwise doesn't really matter because you pretty much never need to touch those parts of the system. Alternate init systems are for power users or people with particular constraints. For example, one of the reasons Alpine Linux is able to be so small is because it uses OpenRC instead of systemd.

Personally, I use a non-systemd distro because my computers all have tiny-sized HDDs by today's standards and I hate having to read a bunch of documentation every time I want to create a new system service. To me, it's easier to just write an ordinary shell script. I don't need all the ridiculous logging capabilities that systemd offers. Regular old plain text is enough for me.

I prefer system d because I also have a cloud VM where I use systemd to run a database and an account service online for the games I make. I found systemd to be pretty darn nice for that. basically a better supervisor and far less bulky than using Docker.

That being said, I almost never use (or even think about) systemd on my Linux Mint install.

When you say you "prefer" what other system did you try and what was the issue that was solved by systemd?

>"...So far I have learned nothing: it's too stable and usable...."

About 20 years ago I was developing new product (commercial media system) and tried to use Linux. After managing to crash system and my application like few times a day I showed it a middle finger and did it in Windows. Was not worth saving on licensing fee.

I came back to Linux about 3 years ago for writing native servers in C++. The difference in experience is night and day. The system is stable to the point that I do not even notice it. Everything I need works like a charm.

I feel like the only thing holding back the year of the Linux desktop is now apps (more Blender-quality stuff is needed) and people actually taking notice of Linux.

I do not think Linux desktop will happen any time soon if ever.

It's just an alternative OS. Alternatives are nice to have.

What has this got to do with TFA?