Then why are all major distros either in the process of switching to systemd, or have already done so? They must be complete morons switching to something that is just pain and suffering!

CoreOS is not designed to be used on just one or two machines. It's designed for huge clusters where one machine rebooting it not a problem. It allows them to implement more reliable updates. You either get it or you don't, and can quickly and easily roll back to the exact same bits you used before.

It's not like the journal format is some state secret. It's documented and there are already several journal parsers to choose from.

If the major distros all switch to Systemd, which looks likely; then that's one less thing that prevents people from switching to another distro. If you want to belive in some kind of conspiracy around Red Hat, then wouldn't they be more likely to just invent their own proprietary init system and make sure that no one else adopted it?

Of course stuff was broken. Stuff is always broken. Sysvinit was broken. Systemd is better but is probably also broken, one day it may as well be replaced by something else. The good part is, we are making progress. Over time the new stuff tend to be less broken than the stuff that came before it. You might tell yourself that nothing was broken before, but chances are it just happened to work well for you. Because if it wasn't broken, then that would be the first time in the history of the planet that a software project was infallible; and that would be amazing.

My understanding is that the Ubuntu community does not have the manpower that it takes to maintain universe, and Canonical is primarily only intrested in maintaining main and restricted. What they really should do is disable universe and multiverse by default.

The Ubuntu security team (which is mostly paid Canonical employees) provides security updates for packages in the main and restricted component. Packages in universe (such as owncloud) and multiverse are not supported by the security team.

The Ubuntu package repositories are divided into two parts. Main and restricted contains a limited number of packages which are supported by the Ubuntu security team, but universe and multiverse are not; they are supported (or in this case unsupported) by the Ubuntu community.

The problem is that Ubuntu users don't know this.

They want you to use their package repository.
If the Ubuntu community wants to provide a version in the Ubuntu repository then the Ubuntu community has to support it.

The reasons that I often hear is more reliable release cycle and supported hardware enabledment kernels during the first two years of and LTS. But yes, most Ubuntu users do not understand the security ramifications of using packages from the Universe component.

Does it still ship with the spyware-inspired keylogger which sends everything you search for to Canonical and others?

Systemd even has a shutdownd. I'm pretty sure it does one thing and does it well.

Except it's not. /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-timesyncd /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd

My system is too old so I don't have the consoled on it, but I imagine that will be a separate daemon as well.

That would of course be nice. But someone has to do the work. It's not like it's just a matter of flipping a bit and everything just works. You actually need to go in and make sure that stuff works with all of them.

http://forkfedora.org/
Not really, but well made.

If systemd really was a bad thing then distributions would not choose it. It's amazing that people think that distributions are dictated which init system to use.