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Systemd has turned into the Godzilla of Linux controversies. "Everywhere you look it's stomping through blogs, rampaging through online discussion threads, and causing white-hot flames that resemble Godzilla's own breath of death," writes Jim Lynch. Now Sam Varghese reports at iTWire that although Linus Torvalds is well-known for his strong opinions, when it comes to systemd, Torvalds is neutral. "When it comes to systemd, you may expect me to have lots of colorful opinions, and I just don't," says Torvalds. "I don't personally mind systemd, and in fact my main desktop and laptop both run it."
Oh, there's been bitter fights before. Just think about the emacs vs vi wars. Or, closer to systemd, the whole "SysV init" vs "BSD init" differences certainly ended up being things that people had "heated discussions" about. Or think about the desktop comparisons.
I'm not really sure how different the systemd brawls are from those. It's technical, but admittedly the systemd developers have also been really good at alienating people on a purely personal level too. Not that that is anything particularly new under the sun _either_: the (very) bitter wars between the GPL and the BSD license camps during late-80s and early-90s were almost certainly more about the persons involved and how they pissed off people than necessarily deeply about other differences (which existed, obviously, but still).
Torvalds was asked if systemd didn't create a single point of failure which makes a system unbootable if it fails. "I think people are digging for excuses. I mean, if that is a reason to not use a piece of software, then you shouldn't use the kernel either."
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday September 19 2014, @10:53PM
I have never, not once, understood why people whined (yes, whined) about SystemD killing Linux (Paul Venezia comes to mind). Did Poettering go shoot all of the SysVinit devs and personally come to your house, uninstall SysVinit on all your machines, and delete all copies of SysVinit in existence? Let's not even talk about which one is better or worse. If you want to use SysVinit, then keep using it.
Now, you might say, all of the major distros are moving to SystemD. So what? It is the distro devs' prerogative to make choices about their distribution. If you don't like it, fork it. You don't even need majority share or anything, you just need to attract enough like-minded people to keep the distro afloat. If you can't, well, maybe that says something about the reasons you want to use SysVinit over SystemD, namely, that no one else agrees with you enough to contribute to your cause (or that the people who think SysVinit is better are people who are not skilled or knowledgeable enough to maintain a distribution, which says something about the validity of their opinions in the first place). Remember, open source is a (brutal) meritocratic anarchy. The best one wins, whether best means technically best, best community, or the de facto Unix philosophy, "worse is better". So instead of whining about SystemD, go make an alternative init or a new SysVinit distro or something.
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