I want to put you down for negativity, for a lack of optimism, but damn it, I agree. It bothers me that come 2016 I will have no option but to move to a systemd based distro if we want to remain on a supported Linux version. Change is not always good.

If it were optional, sure, but it's being rammed down everyone's throats via the popular distros. And unfortunately, I kind of frown on going the whole "Well, just roll your own Linux without the parts you don't like".

As for negativity and lack of optimism, well, I would be very disappointed if sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns became the standard of commentary here.

So your problem is really with the distros, not with Poettering et al. But as the old saying goes, if you think all the distros are assholes, maybe the problem isn't with the distros.

The problem is that key components are being "depreciated" by the Poettering crew for no better reason than "code elegance". Thus distros either have to take over maintainership a ever growing codebase, or accept the Poettering code wholesale.

One can really wonder what is going on when Gentoo opts for picking up maintainership while Debian, that has previously forked Firefox over trademark issues, does not (and Poettering etc are leaving snide remarks aimed at the Gentoo people for this "defiance").

One thing to keep in mind is the gorilla behind the curtains, Red Hat. Key devs of systemd etc are on their payroll...

> key components are being "depreciated"

Only the greater community can do that, and it wouldn't be happening unless the alternative was solving real problems.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

I'm not a huge fan of the distros either, because they should've been on guard for this (having seen the nonsense of, say, PulseAudio).

The bulk of the blame, though, lies with Poettering and friends. Without rehashing every "systemd is terrible" argument out there (and there are many, and I find them as tiresome as you do to review here), the fact remains that political wheeling and dealing is the reason that the project has taken as much root as it has, and that the sheer smugness in the face of reasonable critiques is irksome.

Poettering is part of the group that is "Hey, Linux can be on the desktop too!". History hasn't borne this out, nor likely will it. They'd be welcome to experiment elsewhere, but for them it is anathema that the ecosystem as a whole not follow in their footsteps--and that kinda makes sense, honestly, because for their plan to work they have to kill off all of the features that conflict with their vision of the desktop. Unfortunately, those features are what are kinda important to us folks writing server and infrastructure systems.

It's never going to get fixed, and so we must go beyond the rim.

I know very little about systemd, but it sounds like it solves some issues. The only concrete thing I've seen is starting up services, which has traditionally been idiotic on Linux distros, needing silly boilerplate scripts copied all over. Even Windows does this better in a way.

Independently though, if it's so bad and do obvious that it's bad, why is every major distro picking it up? Is RedHat leaning on Arch behind the scenes?

I you find a place where comments are generally positive, then you've found a place where people avoid challenges rather than face them.

As far as unsupported distros go, void is pretty nice. One of very few interesting distros out there without being a full departure from the norm like nixos.

http://www.voidlinux.eu/

Ubuntu 14.04 is not using systemd...

Why update if you want to keep linux as it is? I am sure there are a few LTS distros around that will stay systemd free for the next few years.

BY which time we'll know if it is really so bad or if it is actually an improvement.

I doubt Red Hat (which has to actually sell it's OS and still flogs a load of Red Hat 6) will carry on pushing it if it really turns out to be a turd. (Yes I know where the main author works).

I don't get it anymore, either. It seems that nowadays the hardest problem of all on Linux is just to start a freaking program after booting. They keep breaking method after method and every single time theres just a mountain of fucking boilerplate to wade through for this months favored solution.

I'm seriously considering to move to Guix, which is essentially the Linux distro Nix reimplemented in Scheme, minus systemd.

Are you a contributor (code? money? documentation?) If so I'm sorry to see you go. Otherwise no worries enjoy...

Likely they see themselves as having done so, as they pretty as the run of the place over at Fedora...