The good people over at Infoworld have published a story outlining why they feel systemd is a disaster.
Excerpt from Infoworld:
While systemd has succeeded in its original goals, it's not stopping there. systemd is becoming the Svchost of Linux—which I don't think most Linux folks want. You see, systemd is growing, like wildfire, well outside the bounds of enhancing the Linux boot experience. systemd wants to control most, if not all, of the fundamental functional aspects of a Linux system—from authentication to mounting shares to network configuration to syslog to cron. It wants to do so as essentially a monolithic entity that obscures what's happening behind the scenes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zafiro17 on Tuesday August 19 2014, @01:53PM
No need for a stampede. There are a hell of a lot of distros out there, and now or soon there will be distros that specialize in not having systemd. Choose one, and live happily ever after. Gentoo was mentioned by name. Head to distrowatch.org and see what you can find. It means you won't be using one of the big/classic distros like Fedora (obviously) or SUSE, but there have got to be other Linux distro packagers who decide to buck the systemd trend. And if there aren't any now, there will be some soon. Meanwhile, as I mentioned, there's always FreeBSD on the server, and PC-BSD on the desktop (which is really just FreeBSD underneath anyway). If PC-BSD likes your hardware (it didn't like my network card, for example), it's a decent KDE desktop with lots of other stuff waiting in the repositories to be installed.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 20 2014, @03:22PM
I know when support runs out for Ubuntu/Xubuntu 12.04 LTS, I'll be looking at Slackware and Gentoo for my servers, desktop, and laptop. Of course, I'd consider other distros that are systemd free, using the apt package manager would be a boon. Sure I could go Debian and select the init packages, but after reading the install process and the need for the systemd shim, I'd rather just learn a new package manager or compile from source.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base