Linux

Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don't know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.

Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.

It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.

All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.

While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system... no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.

I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering's code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.

The traditional init systems suited me just fine, i saw no need to change them. If they were so bad, then they could've been fixed or replaced.

The migration to systemd felt forced. Debian surprised everyone with the change. Also systemd's development is/was backed by corporate Red Hat, their lead developer wasn't exactly loved either and is now working for Microsoft. Of course Canonical's Ubuntu adopted it as well. Overall feels like Windows' svchost.exe, hence people accusing it of vendor lock-in.

It's not just an init system, it's way waaay more. It's supposed to be modular, but good luck keeping only its PID1 in a distro that supports systemd. It breaks the "do one thing right" approach and, in practice, does take away choice which pisses me off.

I had been using Debian since Woody, but that make me change to Gentoo on my desktop which, to me, took the best path: they default to OpenRC but you're free to use systemd if you want to. That's choice. For servers i now prefer Slackware and the laptop runs Devuan whenever i boot it up.

To be fair systemd hasn't shown its ugly face in the Ubuntu VMs i'm forced to use at work.

YMMV. If you're happy with it, fine. This, of course, is only my opinion.

No, it's not bad.

tbh, I've always like Apple's launchd.

Getting a "control center" for your init, with user groups, modularity, memory limits and queryable status/control is great. (Sometime people forget how painful init scripts can be...)

The only problem I see is the tendency to cram everything into systemd.

It’s one of those divisive FOSS matters that get parroted endlessly by people who think they’re smarter than they really are.

Does systemd have its problems? Sure.
Do those problems actually affect most of the people complaining? No.

See also: “Linus said something funny ten years ago, and I heard from a guy who heard from a guy who heard from a guy who once had to edit xorg.conf by hand, so Nvidia is awful forever for everyone!”

As service manager systemd nice, but look all services:

systemd + systemd/journal + systemd/Timers
systemd-boot
systemd-creds
systemd-cryptenroll
systemd-firstboot
systemd-home
systemd-logind
systemd-networkd
systemd-nspawn
systemd-resolved
systemd-stub
systemd-sysusers
systemd-timesyncd

That's look as overkill. I use only systemd, journald, systemd-boot, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved and systemd-timesyncd, but that a lot systemd. Feel like system make monolith.

systemd-nspawn for example. Systems manager for containers. Seriously. Why than exists? I don't understand. Really, someone use that daemon?

Yes and yes.

Personally I always found systemd amazing, it brought logic and order in the init world.

Finally some consistent API and predictable behavior.