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.

That depends on your definition of "Linux". On my Gentoo desktop [OpenRC + MATE], TigerVNC no longer works, because recent versions require Gnome and Gnome requires SystemD.

There was definitely some bullshit in the arguments. One was that systemd could bring up network interfaces much faster, but when you dig into it, that speed "improvement" was largely due to not running the "arping" command to check for duplicate devices already on the network.

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.

Appropriateness of the response to the emergency is part of the legal considerations. Congress granted the power for a reason. Taking that and assuming it means arbitrary power is not operating within the law, not for Trump, not for Biden.

In what way? Please correct me.