It’s not inherently bad, it “fails” the Unix Philosophy of “Do one thing and do it well” but since Linux’s kernel is:
- Unix-like, not Unix
- Fails this philosophy, as it does more than one thing but does all of it pretty well
- systemd is just a bundle of tools that do one thing and do it well under one package, like Linux’s kernel
It used to be a mess, but that’s solved. The biggest reason to avoid systemd is mainly user preference, not anything malicious. 90% of current distros use systemd as its easier for the maintainers and package programmers to build for the general than each package and each distro having their own methods of how to do an init system and other tasks.
How Debian and Arch and Gentoo and Slackware and other big distros worked was different, and the maintainers of those packages had to know “Debian’s way” and not a general way that most places accept. Systemd actually solved the Too Many Standards! issue.
I’ve never really seen a big argument against systemd, but maybe I’ve just not heard it.
It used to be a mess, but that’s solved.
Do you mean the past tense of the verb solve or the systemd service that solves mathematical equations? Because solveds code is still a mess. It used to too, but it still is.
back when you had an init system and you got it just the way you wanted it, you would be pissed that you had to move to systemd
now its there when you install and it is stable so it isn’t a big deal. But old beards hate change.
It also didn’t help that Poettering isn’t particularly popular on a personal level. I think there would have been a lot less drama if he had better people skills.
Yeah, but to be honest, I would have terrible “people skills” too if people sent me death threats over writing a free software.