this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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As I understand, one point is that systemd contradicts with its completeness the Unix philosophy of KISS, small tools that serve only one specific task.
The other point is that the main developer, Lennart Poettering, is employed by "big tech", now Microsoft (before: Red Hat) and thus has switched to the "evil site".
systemd is a monolith in practice, despite what its advocates like to claim. You can't run just a part of it under another init without doing extra patch-up work (see elogind). Whereas you can run just one GNU utility on top of, or even alongside, someone else's implementation of that or other utilities (for instance, in parallel with a rust implementation that isn't quite ready for the big time yet).
systemd also won't work on anything except Linux. Older solutions also worked on BSD. That matters to some people.
And the issue was never just Poettering's employers. He had a bad reputation in parts of the Linux community long before systemd—he was also the main force behind pulseaudio, which was shipped long before it was ready for actual use in the real world and remained in a semi-broken state for quite a long time afterwards. And he often comes across as personally obnoxious. Nothing like telling someone "I'm not interested in fixing your issues with my project" (except less politely) to get them to adopt your code.
Either you build a tool that works well with one OS or you build one that works poorly with several.
And it is not as if those other OSes are waiting for new cross-OS init tools: They either seem to be happy with what they got or want something tailored to their own features.
Considering how widely Lennarts code got adopted: You must be missing something.
Seriously? You're invoking argumentum ad popularum (which is a logical fallacy to begin with) in a discussion of linux technical details? That's so illogical I can't even.
You said Lennart is obnoxious and there is nothing like a big "that is not my problem" to not get your project adopted.
IMHO he does manage to get his projects widely adopted. His personality does not seem to have the effect you claim it has.