You really don't want anything like Windows services. The nice thing about Unix "services" is that they are just regular processes that happen to be started at boot (and know enough to daemonize themselves, typically). Windows services are a whole separate thing with special APIs and are kept track of in the binary registry. To manage them you have to use the arcane (and very old) sc.exe program, or some new-ish Powershell cmdlets. It's not possible to deterministically "delete" a service--it will just be marked for deletion, and the only way to be sure it's done is to reboot.

My nightmare is that systemd evolves towards a system like this--opaque, baroque and difficult to debug.

I haven't seen any sign of systemd going in that direction, though.

Depends what you are looking for but I would look into Slackware. http://www.slackware.com/

> Sadly the other options are quite limited

Jordan Hubbard already said that FreeBSD needs an systemd equivalent. OS X was the first one to get one, Windows traditionally has a general design that resembles systemd much more than any other init system. I think you are running from reality.

I think the problem isn't systemd itself, the problem is "the init system maintained by Poettering et. al."

Give me the coolness of systemd maintained by someone that isn't impossible to work with, and i'd be all for it.

Lennart has produced some "friction" in the past but now that he's been for such a long time on the other side, getting blamed and accused of every silly thing in the world I hope it has changed his ways a bit.

Truth to be told, the systemd community has been reported as one of the most welcoming and productive environment in the FLOSS ecosystem.

I hear that from you and others, and then I read debacles like the Sievers/Torvalds thing on the mailing list (and some other instances of buffoonery linked to there), and immediately conclude that the "welcoming"-ness must only apply as long as you are following the current groupthink and not disagreeing with the BFDLs.

Heck, even that wouldn't be a thing if the people involved had the ability to publicly say "I was wrong on that" - but not even that happens that I've seen.

Tbh I think in the Linus case the one using a less-than-welcoming tone wasn't Sievers. :)

Of course they have a strong vision, and popping up proposing something that has already been discussed to death and rejected won't be the most pleasing experience ever (it happens all the time here, I don't even want to imagine how tiresome it should feel for them).

The resolution does mention there will be documentation on switching to sysv after an installation, so I assume this option will have to be officially supported; it sounds to me as though systemd is simply a default, not a requirement.

Yes, it will be officially supported as systemd is simply a default, not a requirement, as defined by previous CTTE deliberations and as implemented even before them by the Debian systemd team, which has gone to great extents to make sure you can happily switch back and forth with almost no issues.

What are your BSD problems? There are great options for the Desktop (PC-BSD), Server (FreeBSD) and Embedded (OpenBSD).

There are thankfully a few non-systemd linucies around - Gentoo, or others have mentioned Slackware.

OpenBSD for embedded? I used NetBSD in the past for that but is OpenBSD really for embedded? Interesting thought though.

On the other hand, the issues are also in the soft-realtime-ness, the hardware drivers, the embedded community,etc.

Indeed for Desktop or Server, *BSD might do it just fine, though many OSS development env these days are tested by default on Ubuntu/Debian etc instead of BSDs.

My impression is that hardware support is not at Linux level, which is itself somewhat spotty.

Use systemd?