So switch to Solaris and use a real UNIX?

I don't know, Slackware's installer always worked well for me :). The old Anaconda on Red Hat worked pretty well too.

I've not tried any BSD on a laptop. I have, however run Solaris/OpenSolaris on my laptops in the past, and that handled surprisingly well.

You're using Slackware?

That's why I switched my home servers to IRIX...uses a real init system....

BSD init and SMF only replaced init. They didn't attempt to take over the rest of system configuration.

I've always had much better luck with a fresh install of Linux then with Windows. Especially in situations where it may have been the only computer in the location (I know, not a problem any more). I can point to any number of Dell systems I've had in the past 10 years that worked with Linux (with the exception of some Broadcom cards that you needed NDISWrapper for) - my Precision M4500 is better supported under Linux then under Windows (actually is. Finding drivers for Windows 8.1 for it was a nightmare since Dell doesn't support it and there were issues with some of the Windows 7 drivers). I can point to plenty of Thinkpads and Toshiba Satellites that I have sitting around that I never had to muck with any settings to get to work in Linux either.

Really? Because I see plenty of guides and plenty of people who will answer questions about getting XYZ to work with Fedora and Red Hat.

Sun and Ubuntu did replace init, but that's all their replacement did. It didn't creep into other areas and try to take over all of system management.

When I was in charge of managing UNIX servers, I don't recall ever having major issues with any of the AIX boxes (running AIX 7.1 and 6.1). However, the i-series box (IBM i 7.1 IIRC correctly) liked to lock out any user anything similar to the rights of QSECOFR on a regular basis, and I got plenty of use out of the 5250 emulation on the HMC.

I also had quite a few issues with one of my two HP-UX systems (HP-UX 11iv3 on Itanium, the HP-UX 11 on RISC I don't think anyone ever used).

I was complaining in the Fedora community when it first debuted (which was somewhere around Fedora 14 or 15). I also complained about GRUB 2, posted HOWTOs on keeping GRUB 1, and got laughed at for the thought that I wouldn't want systemd or GRUB2 (or GNOME 3, or a desktop that didn't always 'need' 3D accel, etc).

Last time I checked, SMF and upstart just replace init (Launchd is a bit larger in scope, and I don't think I have heard people complaining about it (now I need to see it changes how to use cron jobs on OS X...)) Nor are they written by someone who is fairly disliked within their own communities. Also, Apple and Sun have a lot more at stake for releasing something that works then Fedora does. Fedora has had plenty of releases that were pure crap over the years - they just shrug it off and move to the next one. Personally, I have fallen in love with the some of the old UNIX systems (my home servers are running IRIX at this point) and how simple things used to be to manage.

Those "few loud haters" translate to a whole bunch of system administrators and IT Managers/Directors who played a very large role in getting Linux to it's place in the datacenter today. We have plenty of options, outside of the systemd infested GNU/Linux world to choose from, so why would we want to bother with a system where the developers don't want us?

Interesting - I wonder why GNUTLS is a depedency (I'm building it from source on IRIX right now, no GNUTLS (currently built) on there). On the GPG website libksba is listed as optional, and npth is listed as 'you don't need it but probably want it'.

I'm all for replacing a lot of GNU software because of issues like that. Tying to build it manually ends up being a nightmare, because a lot of it depends on other GNU software they you may not want on there for various reasons.

Except if you put it in systemd, then it becomes confined to Linux. Side note, GPG gets used across quite a few platforms (I see OS X, Windows, and VMS listed on the binaries page, and seems to be good on other Unix systems too), so it makes for a great utility for others to be able to use to verify whatever.

Hey - you can even use Google's TF for your home SSH box.

I don't think the OP was talking about his laptop.

What makes you think systemd addresses issues? Or, I should say, that the BSD people seem them as issues?