Linux distros work well without systemd. In fact, as someone who at one point worked very heavily with it, systemd being absent from a system almost guarantees that it will work better.

Gentoo has openrc, which is a billion times less insane.

This is just plain misinformation, since systemd "won" all packages targets systemd and it's quirks to make all work together.

It doesn't matter if you think systemd is good or bad, a generic system with systemd works better.

Gentoo with openrc has less problems with the init system than Arch has, at least in my experience.

That aside, systemd is a genuinely terrible software project and a genuinely terrible init system.

Just FYI, before my experience of 5 days a week dealing with systemd, I thought people who disliked it were just exaggerating or wanting to be "different". I assumed most hate it was getting was undeserved. My professional experience made it absolutely clear to me that every piece of hate it is getting is well deserved. It is bad software all around, terrible design decisions, completely unpredictable, hard to debug and all around very poorly integrated into the rest of the system.

Enlighten me with the bad design desicions, I use systemd extensively and there are few design decisions I dislike. Some UX could be better but overall I wholeheartedly think systemd is good software.

If you're a fan of monocultures, then all of this is irrelevant since you're using Ubuntu and the quirks of nix/nixos/guix don't matter.

I use NixOS on all my machines. NixOS relies heavily on systemd by design. NixOS would be a lot harder to implement without systemd. With Nix(OS) we can just dump systemd unit files on disk, reload and move on.

There are other declarative init systems that could replace systemd, but what's the point when systemd does everything?

> I use NixOS on all my machines. NixOS relies heavily on systemd by design. NixOS would be a lot harder to implement without systemd. With Nix(OS) we can just dump systemd unit files on disk, reload and move on.

I think guix, nix-darwin, and nixbsd all prove that you can in fact implement such a system just fine without needing systemd.

> There are other declarative init systems that could replace systemd, but what's the point when systemd does everything?

Because systemd doesn't do everything, and depending on it artificially limits what we can do. See guix running on hurd, nix-darwin running on darwin, and nixbsd running on freebsd; systemd explicitly has no interest in supporting anything but Linux.