Well, not just one young arrogant engineer, also most of the maintainers of the major Linux distros in the world.

If it's really a bad idea, the blame doesn't really fall on Poettering. Many young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid, and their things got ignored by the world. Some smaller number of young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid but were able to convince their PHBs that they weren't stupid and they got deployed. I don't think that's how I'd characterize the leadership at Red Hat (I never worked there, but I have good friends who did), but let's suppose that they were clueless and that's why they deployed Poettering's stupid idea.

But then how do you explain why so many others looked at it, experimented with it for a few years, and then decided to adopt it, and even extend it?

The systemd opponents are loud and forceful on social media. The people who actually build the systems, however, disagree. And It's not just one or two groups who are somehow beholden to Poettering, nor is it people who don't know anything or have no technical stake in the decision.

You might want to consider whether you're living up to your nick here.

I don't personally care that much. I find it mildly annoying that the old scripts my finger muscle memory still wants to type by default don't always work... but honestly I rarely need them any more, because my systems Just Work. And I have to consider the possibility that systemd is part of the reason Linux requires so much less maintenance than it used to. There are multiple contributors here. A lot of it is that drivers have gotten a lot better and other aspects of the system have matured (like the audio subsystem :^)).

But given its broad adoption by nearly all open source and commercial Linux distros, Occam's razor says that it's probably better than sysvinit. Or BSD init. Or Upstart. Or OpenRC, or... <insert favorite system manager here>.

This is why there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. The worst people have the most money because they have no compunctions about harming others.

It doesn't actually provide that because of the things you can't do in unit files without scripts.

When systemd proponents can construct a non-fallacious argument maybe I'll consider taking it seriously

There is no value to running SteamOS on your PC over some other distribution except simplicity. If you actually want to do non-game things with it you'll wind up installing enough additional packages to erase the benefit. If you want simplicity, you'll also buy a steam machine, so you don't have to figure out the PC.

Yes, controllers generally cost $80 now. They used to cost $50, but there's this thing called inflation.

A historic motive was that prisoners can not vote and felons lose their voting rights. If you didn't know, that was a plan to take black people out from voting. The tradition continues with other excuses covering for it. It's way more about poor people today and there will be many more poor people... with AI powered policing and legal processes you could be a felon quite easily in the future. Hell, if you just oppose fascism you are now a terrorist Antifa supporter (look it up, it's actually happened. BTW, quickest way to spot a fascist is they hate/fear Antifa.)

OUTSIDE OF PRIVATE PRISONS: the unions for government prison workers are also a problem; sometimes the police unions are a problem too.

If you have a major illness and are broke, you need to rob a bank. More people need to realize we have minimalist universal healthcare after all...

I knew an excon. Tried as an adult. He said prison was like going to college for crime. He also had no trouble getting certain drugs in prison, had a harder time getting off prozac (easy to get) than he did cocaine (hard to get in prison.)

Conservatives (not the tribal brand, actual meaning) are only correct by accident:

The philosophy is founded upon appeal to tradition which is a logical fallacy. They will fire up their brains sometimes and rationalize excuses in a reactionary defense which is inherently flawed and anti-science; rather than use their brains to discover truth, they do what feels good (often selfish) then use their brains to excuse what is arrived by thoughtlessness.

Contradiction, hipocracy and distraction a constant problem for them - for some (now a majority) they give up that fight and just embrace it. Their #1 representative believes it's a virtue and you are weak if you limit yourself to sound reasoning and this has accelerated the adoption of what is beyond even comic book villain monologues.

Crime is largely controlled by conservatives defending their profits by using fear and tactics of "the other." They should be called "right" rather than the better sounding "conservative" label, they prefer "conservative" because they can make up principled arguments for that. Facts do not actually matter, unless they are useful props along with the lies, it doesn't matter it's just another tool for maintaining their position.

The "right" historically was the right hand man of the wealthy establishment who serve the powerful above all else; to most, it's corrupt - to them, it's protecting their small group of people from the masses who they fear will ruin their advantages. USA's "conservative" today is stripped clean of principles and constantly demonstrate that they are rightwing stooges.

The "right" comes from France where they literally kept brawling and nothing got done so the pro-king establishment was put on the right side with moderates separating from the left side republicans (term vs name are now ironic) just to keep them from killing each other... just for a while because the two sides were killing each other often in those days. Back in those days, the wealthy ruling elite were connected with monarchies which is why republicans were against the rich kings, but today we have dictators and wealthy ruling elites (some with more cult status than a king) which serve the same purpose. It's a shame that republics / republicans ONLY means no-king because severely limits the scope of the problem so many people fought against for centuries. It's more dangerous now as more people believe they can someday join the royal family if they just make enough money or marry the right person (we've not come too far from back then have we?) This is why USA Republicans look so much like a contradiction in terms.

amen, brother!

Americans can't solve any problems and the place is stuck in a doom spiral. It's like trying to convince a believer their religion is just a mythology inherited from their upbringing not much different than flat-earthers of the past ( present ones bring up a whole another example of fools.)

The USA always was #1 for cults for a reason!

Besides lacking critical thinking and an anti-intellectual culture (largely countered by educated immigrants but that no longer the case) the culture is all about SHIFTING BLAME, the customer is always right, and so on. It's like they are all a little bit narcissistic. Frankly, every flaw here combined into 1 man turned out to be perfectly represented in their president who they identify with (but not a few things they do see and object to, just everything else they don't see is like themselves... "He's one of us.")

It's not obvious to the blind masses. As the French said, common sense is not so common.
AI is wrecking critical thinking so this will get worse.

Some professional printers do have their spools in cartridges, and refuse to work without them...

5 axis printers using non-planar slicing are becoming more common in pro use, they allow you to print things without supports which would have required supports.

systemd might make sense for ephemeral VMs. That doesn't justify it for long-running servers or desktops.

Every silly error I see in automatic captions today is on Youtube and was created by an LLM. Why didn't it catch them?

I didn't find them to be so. The primary advantage claimed was that it eliminated init scripts. But init scripts are really easy on modern Linux because of the boilerplate, and there are still cases where you need scripts with systemd, so it didn't actually eliminate them — It only reduced their number. The other advantage claimed was that it implemented cgroups. Well, I'm using Devuan and that uses cgroups too, they are created and managed and destroyed with simple commands and you do not need any special tools for that at all.

systemd solves a non-problem, since scripts are a core OS feature.

Closed environments and simulations. Simulations are better in particular because you can create test situations trivially, so you can test on e.g. a thousand variations of the same onramp. You can't really build the vision models in simulation, but that's OK, because you can build them by logging data from cars where the computer isn't controlling anything and therefore isn't endangering anyone.

This isn't new, though, this is obvious. You just want to move fast and break things.

Weren't you here when we discussed this when Debian adopted systemd? The change was rammed through without the normal discussion procedure, specifically for the purpose of supporting GNOME at a time when nobody gave a fuck about it any more. The idea that they have to have had a good reason because they did it is not logic-based.