FAR too much of the project makes exactly the wrong design choices. The worst of these flaws is the binding of previously-independent components discussed near the end of this article.

This bundling Is not even necessary! The features that systemd gets right - an interesting daemon management tool, and providing a useful default start/stop mechanism ("4 lines of config instead of re-writing the same generic shell script") - can obviously be independent features.

This mess should be limited to merely bad design in a particular software niche(s)., but now we're seeing the "my way or nothing" attitude spill over into existing user-level software. (e.g., Gnome[2] I would probably already be using part of it was properly modular. Instead, the bundle is growing even more monolithic and incompatible.

When a similar "forced upgrade/incompatibility" happened to OpenGL (with ES dropping the traditional fixed-function pipeline, JWZ had a very good summary[3] of the the problem, from a "having to maintain old software" prespective:

    Let's say you have a well-specified system that is in wide use (a language, a
    library API, whatever) and because of changes in some substrate (operating 
    systems, hardware, whatever) you find that you need to add a new way of doing 
    things to it.

    The way you do this is, you add new features to the specification and you 
    clearly document the version in which those features become supported.

    If there are old features that you would like to discourage the use of, then 
    you mark them as obsolete -- but you do not remove them because thou shalt not 
    break working code.

    If you don't agree with that, then please, get out of the software industry 
    right now. Find another line of work. Please.

    Your users have code that works. Maybe the new APIs would serve them better. 
    Maybe things would be so much more efficient if they updated their code to use 
    the new API. Or maybe it doesn't matter to them and they just want working code 
    to continue to be working code. At least until such a time as they need the new 
    features, or new efficiency. Remember the First Rule of Optimization: DON'T. 

1: Not giving up my .xinitrc/.Xresources or E16 theme, either. In all cases (along with openrc/sysvinit), they have over a decade's worth of bugfixes and tweaks. Any replacement would have to be very good to be worth the time/effort involved in switching.

2: to be fair, Gnome has been merging thing that shouldn't be merged all the way back to the beginning of the project, and is as much at fault here as systemd itself.

3: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...