"I've administered Linux systems since 1995."

So you have "administered Linux" since 1995 and you both chose Ubuntu and didn't do any research to see if the laptop you were buying had hardware that wasn't supported (if we are to believe your story at all)? I wouldn't go around telling anyone that story, let alone posting it on Slashdot.

" It's something that actually requires a little thought and analysis."

No. It doesn't require any thought actually. The problem with your statement stems from your lack of understanding of the term "Patent Troll."

" But a high-profile IT company that starts filing patent law suits can only mean one thing, the company has peaked and is on its way down. "

Actually there is another thing it could mean. It could mean somebody is violating their patents. Had that possibility not occured to you?

The Point
------------- (Dear moronic Slashfilter, It's not fucking "ASCII Art", it's a fucking line)
Your Head

"Yeah, right. Why don't you trying setting up shared-storage active-active clusters with ANY of the "free" alternatives? "

Yes. That's why Google is Oracles biggest customer! Without Oracle you just can't do it!

"Do you really not acknowledge the existance of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and more?"

Do you not acknowledge OS X, Windows, BeOS, C-64 DOS, CP/M, PS/2, VMS, MVS, Amiga DOS, Apple DOS, etc.!!!!?????

I guess you don't get that there are lots and lots of OSes that aren't Linux, and trying to be one system to rule them all is a fools errand? Again, you don't know anything about software engineering so stop complaining when the people who do make the right choice. When I said systemd is universal that means in a Linux conext, and your attempts to paint it as otherwise are not "cute" or "insightful".

" Just because something does the job and hasn't been mucked with in years does not mean it should be presumed garbage and replaced."

Your statement shows how much you don't know about init systems. every init system has been mucked with constantly. Again, your delusion that there is a single (or even two) init systems that "haven't been mucked with" blasts your complete lack of understanding of init systems to the world at high volume (and the bass is way to frigging loud.)

"Ignoring the very real problem that putting so damn much in PID 1 is dangerous for system stability and security"

Yeah. We ignore that because that isn't remotely true, and you are just repeating misinformation you heard and showing that you don't have a basic understanding of how Linux or systemd works.

"Also, despite the fact that dependencies are baked-in to systemd, it's not at all uncommon for a service that depends on an something else (service, NFS mount, etc.) to still start up before the dependency is fully ready, simply because the default systemd is to assume the dependency is fulfilled as soon as whatever "starts" it returns."

So it is not at all uncommon for people to use the default when they shouldn't, and that is somehow systemd's fault?

"Most init systems have a negligible amount of code running as pid 1, meaning init itself is unlikely to ever cause a blip at runtime. "

It means no such thing. You need to learn about spwan and fork, then get back to us.

"better counter argument would be that the kernel itself has even more complex needs and runs in an equally critical context."

I was going to make a similar point, without the lack of understanding of the kernel that you have. The kernel does not run " in an equally critical context" at all. It often runs in a far more critical context. Systemd runs in User space. The kernel runs in ... wait for it ... kernel space. Just as you don't understand fork and spawn, you clearly don't understand how privilege segmenting works in Linux. Much of the kernel runs in Ring 0 for example. It can disable interrupts and do all kinds of things that systemd cannot because ... wait for it ... it runs in user space.

"What systemd advocates fail to recognize is that not everyone should have to be an application developer to administer systems. "

Are you a troll? There is nothing more inherently complex about systemd than any other init system (and there are hundreds that fall under the SysV and BSD style, so don't kid yourself thinking there are two.) You can learn one system with systemd, rather than having to relearn how each distribution is using the basic SysV or BSD style approach completely differently from every other.

tldr?: EPIC FAIL