The self-proclaimed "Veteran Unix Admins" forking Debian in the name of init freedom have released Beta 2 of their "Devuan" Linux distribution.
Devuan came about after some users felt it had become too desktop-friendly. The change the greybeards objected to most was the decision to replace sysvinit init with systemd, a move felt to betray core Unix principles of user choice and keeping bloat to a bare minimum.
Supporters of init freedom also dispute assertions that systemd is in all ways superior to sysvinit init, arguing that Debian ignored viable alternatives like sinit, openrc, runit, s6 and shepherd. All are therefore included in Devuan.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:28PM
Actually you do: Udev is still used in devuan (the one from systemd, too). Udev will potentially run a lot of stuff. Do you want all that in /? Someone might want to run /use from NFS, somebody else might want to use crypto, somebody else might want to amb-mount /usr, or use ceph or whatever new networked OS.
If you want to keep / functionalmenough to bring up /usr for all those use cases you need to move a lot of junk into /. And there is no way for distributions to check that they really got everything covere, which means the whole thing is hit or miss. Go and check the bugs open in all distributions about exactly this kind of issue! Now add all the siscussions about whether something needs to be in / or /usr. A lot of time is wasted there.
This is something that is driven by distributions, not by systemd.