Mostly these are packages that predate the establishment of the /etc/default standard, or packages that are small third-party things that aren't shipped by distros, or are so badly coded that you can't actually change installation paths during the build process.
Because even if packages typically don't do it, distros would usually change that- even when it means applying patches to the code while building packages (official debian packages almost always have patches included to modify the package to debian standards - other distros are a bit more lax about it).

But SystemD is not archaic, and it's not a small third-party package whose developers are few in number and perhaps just don't care or know about the standard. It's a major system component, which has pushed itself as an irreplaceable part of every major distro now. Surely such a component of all things should try to comply with good practise and standards ?
Surely the the bar should be higher for a component that aims to replace most of the other components in a linux system ?

But SystemD has never cared about best practise or standards or legacy of any kind. They do whatever the hell they want and everybody else has to either adapt to whatever THEY decided is how we WILL work - or we have to go to the extreme effort now required to avoid them.

That's the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You want your code in a distro ? On my PC ? You should be adapting to the distro's standards, and to MY needs and desires - if you can't do either, then you belong on neither. Upstream should not get to dictate to downstream, that's the way of closed-source software.
The entire point and purpose of free and open source software is the opposite: that downstream should be in control of itself, which requires that the only possible path to acceptance for upstream must be to comply with the wishes and standards that downstream establishes.

But downstream isn't one place, there are multiple stops along the way. The assessment of "Better" was made on stop down (the distro packagers) but nobody every really considered the question of whether it would be "better" (by your own measure) for the those even further downstream - the users, the sysadmins, the devops engineers.

I think, objectively, that it wasn't - at least for a large subset of those further downstream (notably experts and sysadmins).

1) It's possible - a big part of Gnome3's growth however was weakening the "we know what's good for you" arrogance of the developers (partly due to the huge user-losses they suffered on release) and actually listening to their users. Thus far, systemd seems quite uninterested in that.

2) This leads into the other problem with systemd - which may make the odds of improvement lower. It is more on the fundamental design level. There is a reason the unix philosophy is what it is. "Small programs that do one thing and do it well", "Simple pipes and text-based configs and communications. It's because this has been the single most succesfull development philosophy is the history of computer science. Unix is now almost 50 years old - no other OS that old is still in active use. It runs on everything from massive server-farms and mainframes to cellphones. Doing widely disparate jobs and it adapts to all these completely different usage scenarios. Just within Linux you have GNU stacks, you have the JAVA based android stack, you have busybox - if you feel like it you can build a system by compiling BSD utilities from source on a Linux kernel and build BSD/Linux - nothing stops you (the only reason you can't go download that is because nobody has wanted it badly enough to maintain such a system - but there's nothing stopping you from making one).

The reason it can adapt is that philosophy - because it's made up of simple drop-in-and-replace programs you CAN adapt it for any use-case. The unix philosophy is very much the software equivalent of an old-style giant bucket of legos. You can drop and in and replace any brick with any other, the pieces are all ridiculously simple but they can connect to each other in well-understood ways and you can build truly magnificent structures by coupling all these simple pieces together in arbitrary ways.
SystemD violates that approach entirely. And so you get the very issue you describe - in one of the most common use-cases it works quite well, in the other most common use-case it works a lot less well - and in the millions of niche use-cases... it fails entirely, because I can't no longer take individual components and arbitrarily swap them out, or put them together in arbitrarily different ways.
The Unix philosophy is to give you a bucket of lego bricks so you can build whatever you need.
SystemD is more like the modern lego-kits, sure it may give you a prettier model of the death-star, but you can't build a model Boeing 747 from the same kit. The lego company apparently decided they'll make more money selliing people single-purpose kits than buckets they can play with for decades and build anything with - it doesn't mean the buckets weren't a far superior product.

And that's a real issue- because even the one use-case it's great at isn't static (not to mention it's a shrinking part of the market - I suspect it's only a matter of time before only programmers, gamers and engineers have desktops at all anyway) - the needs there will change in time, it may change very radically, and it's impossible to predict how it will change. For Microsoft it meant having to rewrite their entire API from scratch in the mid-2000s because it simply could no longer do what their market required, systemD is now creating the groundwork for the same thing happening to Linux in the end - because it's not small, generic blocks you can put together differently to meet new needs when they arrive, you either have to extend systemD to support those needs - or if it cannot be logically be extended that way, you'll have to abandon it entirely and write an all new system !
That's a very real issue - and one there is no good answer for.

So, unfortunately, that leads me to predict that systemD is more likely to get worse than better - the more our needs evolve, the harder it will be for such a large all-encompassing and interconnected project to evolve along.

No. I didn't change anything. No configs, editable or otherwise, should exist outside /etc. Configs installed by packages which should be overridden rather than edited (what you described the ones under /usr as being) belong under /etc/default. They no more belong under /usr than the similar files installed by a thousand other packages do.

Right...
And /etc/default is good enough for every other package but not for systemd.

You know, if you don't follow the standards and "misconceptions" arise - it's the fault of bad development.

I should not comment from my phone. Man autocorrect rapes my text...

Tough question. Depends what that functionality is. Compatibility is valuable but sometimes it must be sacrificed to deal with technical debt or make genuine progress. Even Microsoft had a huge compatibility break with Vista which was needed at the time (even if Vista itself was atrocious).
It would depend what those features were, what benefits it gave me. It would be a trade off and should be evaluated as such. A major sacrifice requires an even more major advantage to be worthwhile. I've yet to see any such advantage from anything systemd has added. I'm not saying advantages don't exist, I'm saying whatever they may be they do not benefit me, personally, in any measurable way. The disadvantages however do, and compatibility is the least of them.
Config outside /etc is a major deal - it utterly breaks with a standard around which disk space allocation is done professionally. /use ought to not even need backups because everything there is supposed to be installed and never hand edited. It means modifying backup strategy which is a big, very risky, cange. Logs aren't where I expect them. Boot errors flash on screen and disappear before you can read them so you have to remember to go look in the binary log to figure out if it was something serious.

I was never a fan of system V. It was a complicated, slow, mess if code duplication. It needed a replacement. I was championing Richard Gooch's make-init circa 2001 (and his devfs, the forerunner to udev, was in my kernels - I built a powerful hardware autoconfig system on it in 2005 when I built the first installable live CD distribution, the way they all work now: I invented it [I later discovered that pclinuxos had invented the same thing independently at the same time but Ubuntu for example still came on two disks, a live CD and separate text based installation disk and more than once I had machines where the live cd ran great but the installed system broke due to disparate hardware setup systems]). Later I praised upstart - it was a fantastic unit system that solved the issues with system V, retained compatibility but was easy to admin, standards and philosophy compliant and fast. It was even parallel.

That is the system that should have won the unit wars. I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu's eclectic side, unity has always been a fugly unusable mess of a desktop to me - but upstart was great, that and PPAs are Ubuntu two most amazing accomplishments. Sadly one got lost instead of being the world changing tech it deserved to be and it lost to a wholly inferior technology for no sane reason.

It's the Amiga of the Linux world.

It's not a corporation. It's a privately held company.

>To me, the fact that the major distros have adopted systemd is strong evidence that it is probably better

"Better" is a subjective term. Software (and any product really) does not have some absolute measurable utility. It's utility is specific to an audience. The fact that the major distros switch is probably strong evidence that systemd is "better" for distro developers. But the utility it brings them may not apply to all users, or even any particular user.
A big part of the reason people were upset was exactly that - the key reasons distros had for switching was benefits to people building distros which subsequent users would never experience. These should not have trumped the user experience.

All that would still have been fine - we could easily have ended up with a world that had systemd for those who wanted it, and didn't have it for those who didn't want it. Linux systems are supposed to be flexible enough that you can set them up to whatever purpose you desire.

So where the real anger came in was the systemd's obsessive feature-creep made it go into a lots and lots of areas that have nothing to do with it's supposed purpose (boot process management), in that area it's biggest advantages are only useful to people building distributions (who have to maintain thousands of packages and ensure they reliable handle their bootup requirements regardless of what combination of them is actually installed- systemd genuinely did make that easier on them - but no user or admin ever experiences that scenario). But that feature creep itself wasn't even the issue, the issue was that - as it entered into all these unrelated areas (login was the first of many) - it broke compatibility with the existing software to do those jobs. This meant that, if you built a system to support systemd, that same system could not use any alternatives. So now, you had to create hard dependencies on systemd to support it at all - for distros to gain those benefits, they had to remove the capacity for anybody to forgo them, or alternatively provide two versions of every package - even ones that never touch the boot process and get no benefit from systemd's changes there.

And the trouble is - in none of those other areas has it offered anything of significant value to anybody. Logind doesn't actually do anything that good old login didn't do anyway, but it's incompatible so a distro that compiles it's packages around logind can't work with anything else. Replacing the process handler... and not only did it not add any new functionality it broke some existing functionality (granted, in rarer edge cases -but there was no reason for any breakage at all because these were long-solved problems).

Many years ago, I worked as a unix admin for a company that developed for lots of different target unix systems. As such I had to maintain test environments running all the targets. I had several linux systems running about 5 different distros, I had solaris boxes with every version from 8 onwards (yep, actual Sparcs), I had IBM's running AIX, I even had two original (by then 30 year old) DEC Alphas running Tru64... and I had several HPUX boxes.

At the time, while adminning all these disparate unix environments on a day-to-day basis and learning all their various issues and problems - I came to announce routinely that Solaris pre-Version-10 had the worst init system in the word to admin, but the worst Unix in the world was definitely HPUX because HPUX was the only Unix where I could not, with absolute certainty, know that if I kill -9 a process - that process would definitely be gone. WIped out of memory and the process table with absolutely no regard for anything else - it's a nuclear option, and it's supposed to work that way - because sometimes that what you need to keep things running.
SystemD brought to Linux an init system that replicated everything I used to hate about the Solaris 8/9 init system - but what's worse than that, it brought the one breakage that got me to declare HPUX the absolute worst unix system in history: it made kill -9 less than one hundred percent absolutely, infallibly reliable (nothing less than perfect is good enough - because perfect HAS been achieved there, in fact outside of HPUX and SystemD - no other Unix system has ever had anything LESS than absolute perfection on this one).

I absolutely despise it. And yet I'm running systemd systems - both professionally and at home, because I'm a grown man now, I have other responsibilities, I don't want to spend all my time working and even my home playing-with-the-computer time is limited so I want to focus on interesting stuff - there is simply not enough time for the amount of effort required to use a non-niche distro. I don't have the time to custom build the many software the small distros simply don't have packages for and deal with the integration issues of not using proper distro-built-and-tested packages.
I live with systemd. I tolerate it. It's not an unsurvivable trainsmash -but I still hate it. It still makes my life harder than it used to be.
It makes my job more difficult and time-consuming. it makes my personal ventures more complicated and annoying. It adds no value whatsoever to my life (seriously - who reboots a Linux system often enough to CARE about boot-time - you only DO that if you have a security patch for the kernel or glibc - anything else is a soft-restart) it just adds hassle and extra effort... the best thing I can say about it is that it adds LESS extra effort than avoiding it does, but that's not because it's superior to me in any way - it's because it's taken over every distro with a decent sized package repository that isn't "built-by-hand" like arch or gentoo.

Your accusation actually makes no sense. How can you accuse the democrats of being unwilling to compromise and negotiate when the entire legislative approach of republicans have been to preclude the possibility? How do you negotiate on a bill when they won't let you read it? How do you offer ammendments or debate when the bills are secret until hours before the vote? Forget 2 years of negotiating major bills, Republicans refuse to offer 2 hours. Even most fellow Republicans don't get to know what they will be asked to vote on!

Really. I remember the democrats having meetings with Trump repeatedly to achieve things in this year. As horrible as he is they were willing to negotiate and make compromises on things that could be compromised on to achieve something genuinely important to the people. Hurricane relief.

And even if you had been right it would just have been a response to what the Republicans began 6 years ago. Either way it can't be fixed until neither party controls the whole government alone.

Let's say you're right. That doesn't change that on this issue at least a democratic wave would be a win for society. Now you can argue that this is only because dems are corrupted out to corporations whose interests in this regard happen to allign with our own - you may even be right, but you're STILL wrong to claim changing the majority party can't fix this issue completely.

Even all that aside, if you believe that both parties are equally corrupt - you really, really WANT a system where the opposition party controls at least one house on the hill, the best way to stem corruption (especially in this hyperpartisan era) is to make it so it's absolutely impossible to pass any law without a significant number of opposition politicians actually agreeing with it.

That was how Washington used to work - in fact as recently as 2010 it's how things worked. Reagan passed his tax reform as a bipartisan effort that took two years of cross-party negotiation.
Obamacare took two years of negotiation with loads of input and ammendments, public hearings, things added and removed by republicans - and quite a few republican votes in the end.

Then came the "lets make him a one-term president by actively blocking ANYTHING he wants to do - even if it's something we wanted to do ourselves for years" thing (it had sort of begun with Obama's election but only really picked up steam after the republicans 2010 midterm gains allowed them actually behave that way).

Now I chose those two examples quite deliberately. They came from opposite sides of the spectrum, based on completely opposite ideas of how things should be done - but in both cases they were done slowly, deliberately, in a negotiation process that ultimately got most of the opposition on-board.

Thus far this year, both those topics have been up again. Healthcare and taxes. In both cases republicans have tried to fly-by-night the legislation, keep it secret until the last possible moment, done all in their power to avoid any public debate or any chance for even their OWN politicians to know what's in the law before the vote. This is what happens when a party has full control of the government and no longer gives a damn.

What's worse - their approach seems to be that they think they'll be forgiven any horrible thing they do, just so long as they "fuck the liberals". No need to govern the COUNTRY, no need to try and make decisions that benefit their districts, their voters or even their base - their base will be happy as long as they fuck those annoying liberals over.

Somehow, since 2010 - being willing to negotiate a decent compromise bill and acknowledge you're there to serve the ENTIRE country went from "how the good politicians do things" to "an act of treason we will not tolerate in a republican", somehow liberals, democrats, progressives and whatever else you want to lump in there on the left went from "fellow Americans I disagree with" to "an enemy that must be destroyed by any means necessary" , somehow they aren't "real Americans" anymore, and any negotiation with them, any attempt to consider their views is seen as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

That's a recipe for a government that is not only wholly disfunctional but utterly incapable and uninterested in ever doing anything for the people that elected them - as long as you promise to fuck the liberals over, your seat will be safe after all.

So yes, this is a terribly bad situation and one-of-a-kind one that America has never seen before. It is absolutely crucial for the survival of America that Washington be taught that this is not behavior the electorate will tolerate or reward, that democrats win by a fucking landslide in 2018 - to teach republicans that this approach to governance is bad for their own careers.

Yes, a major victory by the other side WILL fix the single biggest problem in American politics today - which has fuckall to do with corruption. Sure corruption is bad - but it's teenaged acne next to the cancer of "the opposition are the enemy" that republicans embrace today.

You DO have a war by now, to prove Trump is not weak.

Just because the other guys didn't fight back after he bombed them doesn't mean it wasn't an act of war, committing an act of war is a declaration of war.

You can't get around that.

Hell, you had a war less than 3 months into his presidency. The other guys just weren't willing to strike back. So one may call it a very short war...except there are still a bunch of US soldiers there, ready for the next time, so it's really not over.

If there are US soldiers in a country, and they haven't been invited by the government of that country, you are at war with that country - technicalities be damned, if a US weapon is used on a foreign nation by order of the commander in chief, you ARE at war with that nation, technicalities be damned.

The real difference is, if Hillary was president, we wouldn't have an ACTUAL worry that nuclear armageddon might happen because the president was feeling insecure about his dick size one morning.
That is actually a thing that could happen now. It hasn't been a thing that was likely to happen since the end of the cold war... Trump brought it back.

When republicans wanted the 1950s back - did they REALLY want the threat of nuclear armageddon back with it?

I want to know why he kept watching after blowing his load, the other 29 minutes and 55 seconds were just wasting money.

There has never in history been a time when private charity could achieve the full needs of all those who, through no fault of their own, need help (and that's without even counting things where "fault of their own" is up for debate - like addiction).

It has always and consistently fallen massively short - including long before welfare states existed.

And yet somehow, magically, you believe it would get big enough if we take the welfare state away ? Even though it has never, ever happened before- in history.

That's a massively extraordinary claim and it requires massively extraordinary evidence to convince me - your blind faith doesn't suffice.

Private charity tried to deal with the phossy jaw problem.
The market tried to address it through competition.
Unions tried to address it through collective bargaining.
Thousands of poor, desperate women kept dying every year in one of the most brutal deaths imaginable so matches could cost a little bit less for 4 decades.

Nothing worked to even reduce, let alone end, that atrocity until government regulation forced it's end in 1910.

You fear being a slave for the government. But having to take a job that will probably kill you in 2 years to avoid starving today. is a much more clearcut form of slavery - and it's what ACTUALLY happens when you don't have regulations and welfare. It's the doom of 99% of people when those things aren't there to constrain the 1% that were born lucky.
Every libertarian must either not know this (which means they've not read enough history - or been to blinkered in whose accounts they read and who they excluded), or they are convinced they will be part of the 1%.
Since libertarians make up about 10% of the US population - it means that even if the entire 1% were libertarians - 90% of you are still wrong.

There is a 90% chance that, in your utopia - you're (yes, talking to you personally) only choices would be "starve today or die a brutal, torturous death in 2 years".