- A complete disregard for precedent.
There are precedents to changing init systems on unixy systems: Mac has launchd, Solaris has SMF. Sysvinit itself was called an aberation when it was introduced, too, doing away with the much simpler BSD-style init.
I would consider systemd very unixy: It has lots of small tools, each designed to do something well. These work in concert to accomplish complex tasks. This whole "unix philosophy" thing is basically in the eye of the beholder.
- An uncompelling value proposition. I don't much care about boot time
Boot time is a side-effect.
Better hardening options for services is a value systemd brings to the table. Process management is another big one. Better logging, too. A more robust boot free of races is hard to argue with too (provided you have been bitten by such a race condition before:-). Finally socket activation greatly simplifies dependency management.
Systemd uses DBus, an established, well understood and well tested protocol to communicate in favor of rolling its own. That can be considered a huge plus: Or have you never seen custom protocol parsers explode before, especially those written in C?
- Lack of concern for the server use case, and sysadmins in particular.
I wonder where you got that from. Systemd is particularly well suited for server systems: It makes for a more reliably boot process, it provides easy ways to harden services run, it can monitor running services, it collects way more log entries and enriches them with a lot of information directly from the kernel.
- Tying perfectly-good cross platform programs to Linux. Why my window manager or graphics program has to depend on init, I don't know.
Systemd is designed to make all the features of Linux available to admins. Those features are not available elsewhere, so of course systemd is neither. Blame that on the kernel developers, not on systemd.
Why does it your desktop environment depend on systemd? Because the developers of your desktop environment have decide that the services provided by systemd are valuable to them. Note that the desktop environment technically does not depend on systemd running as PID1, just on some of the daemons that are developed in the systemd repository. Those do in turn depend on systemd being PID1, but that is a different story:-)
If you do not know something, then maybe you should spend your time trying to understand the issue at hand before commenting in a public forum?
- Most importantly, the community is extremely toxic.
My experience with the systemd community was positive all the way. Any questions I had were answered in a friendly and helpful way. My patches were reviewed in a direct but friendly fashion and applied after all parties were happy with them. That is more that I can claim about many other projects I had contact with.
And I have seen several comments that have been well refuted but are brought up again and again. Well, I am happy with the answers to those comments, obviously the people making those comments are not.
And the most troubling aspect of this toxic community are the attacks on opponents.
There are rather a lot of opponents attacking proponents as well. That is no excuse for anybody to misbehave, but at this point *both* sides need to step back and take a deep of breath.
[...] No, there was outcry all those other times (in the PulseAudio case, quite rightly), but this is by far the most severe I've seen. And do any of these proponents think to ask - why? No, they decide it must just be change aversion and claim they're all just trying to set up a guild to keep their practices secret.
The outcry when the complex monster known as sysv init was introduced to replace the beautiful and simple BSD-style init was rather loud, too. Of course we were a much smaller group of people caring about Linux back then.
I have seen quite a few of the people arguing against systemd admit freely that they have never used it. That did give me the impression that much of the fuss ultimately results from a resistance to change, but I might be wrong.
Also I am convinced that there are actually only very few opponents that just manage to raise a lot of noise. E.g. the uselessd site consistently speaks about "we" and "our", but when you check the source code repository the whole thing was written by one person. I suspect other sites are doing the same. Maybe they are ultimately all run by one person with way too much time on their hands. Who knows?
[...] For the most part I don't have to think about booting - just like when I used to run Windows. But now when I have to, it's much, much easier than it was on Windows, because there's no complexity - it's just some folders with symlinks to shell scripts that get run![...]
Checking for a file in /usr/lib/systemd/system (which can be overridden in /etc/systemd/system is hardly comparable with windows startup. And I find reading a couple of lines with declarations like "Run this binary" and "Use this Environment" much easier to grok than several hundreds of lines of init scripts (that is including the helper code that the scripts drag in).
You seem to be more intelligent than me if you have no trouble with those scripts! And you also must be a better programmer than most of the authors of init scripts, which are often racy and even buggy.
All of you reading this: Think about it. I'm sure you've read attacks by each side about the other. But for the most part, I've seen systemd opponents attacking technical, philosophical, and architectural choices (which includes "we don't want to look like Windows with svchost.exe"), while systemd proponents are attacking their intended users. Which side seems more dangerous?
I have seen way more name calling in systemd discussions than arguments, be they technical, philosophical or architectural. And that is from *both* sides.