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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.
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systemd: Harbinger of the Linux Apocalypse.
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When in panic, fear and doubt,
Drink in barrels, eat, and shout.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by forsythe on Tuesday August 19 2014, @02:30PM
I agree with your appraisal of X (and systemd, for that matter), but I'm also growing increasingly wary of ``This is broken, let's rewrite it to be awesome because we're geniuses!''. Systemd (vs. init), Pulse (vs. ALSA, OSS), Wayland (vs. X) any new DE (vs. the previous version), new udev (vs. old udev), etc. all leave a bad taste in my mouth. X certainly has the best argument for replacement, but I'm not convinced that Wayland is the necessary replacement.
Libressl (from the OpenBSD folks) is the only major rewrite project (that I can think of right now) which I'm actually anxious to use.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday August 19 2014, @07:00PM
Lets not forget GRUB, it used to be great, everything in one config file. Want to change the default wait time, a kernel argument or add an entry all you had to do was edit one file and reboot. Done. Now you have to find the right "configlet" file, among 20+ other files in different directories, edit that file, then call some utility that takes all the configlets and creates the single config file that you can't edit directly anymore. And the documentation is a steaming pile. The improvements added between the versions didn't warrant a complete rewrite of the configuration process. First thing I do on a new install is purge it and install grub-legacy. I can live without being able to boot from an ISO in grub, I've got VMs for that.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Informative) by zafiro17 on Tuesday August 19 2014, @07:43PM
Glad to hop on this bandwagon. OP is totally right. I just downloaded and installed LinuxBBQ the other day (www.linuxbbq.org) and by default it installs LILO and I found myself gushing over how simple and easy LILO is compared to Grub legacy, too. I accepted Grub over LILO because it did away with the risk of forgetting to re-run lilo and borking your system. But it was never clear to me why Grub needed to be updated. In fact somewhere out there is a little utility you could run on a floppy disk that would let you boot Linux or a dozen other OSes. Forget what it's called, but in theory it provided more improvements over grub than the new version of grub ever did. Fooey on all this "improvement." Get offa my lawn, while you're at it.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @10:03PM
a little utility you could run on a floppy disk that would let you boot Linux or a dozen other OSes
Sounds like you're talking about PLoP Boot Manager.
Smart Boot Manager is another that is commonly mentioned.
There's a scad of them. [wikipedia.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @11:28PM
If, instead of replacing your working kernel, you added a second kernel entry at the end of your LILO config, then if you forget to rerun LILO the worst that happens is you have to boot into your old kernel, run lilo, then reboot.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday August 20 2014, @11:59PM
more complicated without adding much (directly related) benefit = breakage
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday August 23 2014, @05:44AM
Use syslinux, you swine. Syslinux will crush you all!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday August 19 2014, @07:46PM
I'm not sure it's fair to compare pulse to ALSA/OSS, as they operate on separate levels and really aren't there to do the same thing at all. If anything, it's worth blaming the distros for really going out of their way time and again to break things.
I personally use Pulse on Slackware (making me in a very small minority). Because Pulse allows me to do things (using ALSA) that ALSA cannot do by itself, such as output my music from one sound card (speakers) while another audio stream (perhaps a private video call) to a headset, all at the same time.
Thing is, Pulseaudio works fairly reasonably for what it tries to do (once ALSA is reasonably configured to output to it). The biggest issue with it seems to be that distros are assuming that people need this functionality badly enough to make user after user spend hours figuring out why they're getting no sound at all from a fresh install that is more complicated than it actually needs to be in the first place. While it's gotten better over the years, it still seems nuts considering that most users really just would be fine with a working ALSA configuration using dmix for hardware mixing, and if they needed pulse, should be able to just grab it themselves (just like people do with Jack...).
As for most of the rest of your examples though, I'll mostly agree. While I don't mind the exercise of making new tools to try to do it better, or just increase the options out there, it is a little scary watching as the distros line up to all adopt the same thing as all of the rest regardless of the fact that it's unnecessary and adds more confusion and general bugginess to the mix. Whatever happened to "if it's not broke, don't fix it"?