alt Hacker NewsI have a curious question. My local setup has worked for me for ages ever since arch decided to switch to systemd. Same on the servers I deal with, after Debian's switch. At the same time, I can say I'm not involved with inner workings of a Linux system enough, to be affected by init system change and the pain it might bring.
In other means consider me an average Joe of the Linux world.
Hence this question: If it sucks so much, why did it become so widespread?
Replies
It doesn't suck, people are just emotional beings and have some "football team" level takes on technical stuff as well.
The very same people that hate systemd for "being a monolith" and limiting choice are usually also love X and hate Wayland where they can manage to explain how being a monolith is suddenly good.
Especially that systemd is pretty modular - at least the actual systemd program running as PID 1. It also refers to a project with many optional modules running under the same name, but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith.
It doesn't suck "now". It sucked when fedora and arch switched to it. I mean it of course wasn't complete garbage but it had a lot of bugs and people generally don't like to be used as red hat's guinea pigs.
When red hat switched to it, it was stable enough. Before then people were complaining because they did find bugs and issues (I know I did) and were being told to STFU by inexperienced users who have the most basic and standard use case and weren't encountering the issues (or were but didn't even notice).
Very common is the case of some person who sometimes uses linux on their machine telling a system administrator who has thousands of machines under his responsibility what's what.