I find it telling how to LP "the Unix way" is to have everything in the same repository and developed by the same people: "What's typical for Unix, for example, is that all the tools, the C library, the kernel, are all maintained in the same repository, right? And they're released in sync, have the same coding style, the same build infrastructure, the same release cycles - everything's the same. "

He only needed to google a bit to find this, but it is telling that he won't even give himself to the trouble. It is even funnier when later in the interview he claims to listen to people!

All in all, an interesting propaganda piece, a re-hash of previous ones done by LP on his blog.

I've been bit by a similar systemd issue. The only way to get it to work is to boot from a USB key or from cd, and force a fsck on all your filesystem. Apparently some systemd versions have race conditions with fsck and won't mount / unless the fsck ended successfuly. Add that to another bug where it won't show a console...
I think these have by now been fixed, but I had your problem also with arch linux, some months ago, on at least two pcs.

Systemd's occasional (read: frequent in one of my pcs) failure to shutdown is how I found out that the devs had decided that sysreq was too dangerous for the users to have and had to be disabled.

So I was stuck with a system waiting forever for something to shutdown, and without being able to use sysreq to kill all the processes and unmount file systems safely. Of course, the only way out was a hardware reset, with the subsequent log corruption that let me with no hints on why systemd would not allow my pc to shutdown. Well, at least it got me moving to evaluate the still rational linux distributions out there, as well as the *BSDs, something I had been procrastinating for a few months.

Seems like you're wrong, they added support for systemd dbus calls, but no dependency on systemd libs. It will use it if it's there, but doesn't require it.

This message has a small description of what they did. Too bad other developers don't want to be this conscious and prefer to link with systemd libs, needed or not.