A developer affiliated with boycottsystemd.org has announced and released a fork of systemd, sardonically named uselessd.
The gist of it:
uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on your viewpoint) is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.
uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far.
They then go on to tout being able to compile on libc implementations besides glibc, stripping out unnecessary daemons and unit classes, working without udev or the journal, replacing systemd-fsck with a service file, and early work on a FreeBSD port (though not yet running).
Responses from the wider Linux community are yet to be heard.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:57PM
Err, it's still possible to run Debian with systems other than sysvinit or systemd. BSD init, while not common, doesn't really have anything about it stopping you from throwing it on.
I'd still argue that including pulseaudio by default is a poor choice. Giving a distro geared at new users a sound system with more complexity added on top of the already complex enough (with the messiest documentation around) ALSA all too often runs into "I got my system installed, but sound doesn't work, and argh, this is frustrating...screw it, I'm reinstalling Windows 8." While pulseaudio does have real advantages, it's unnecessary to have a base functioning system up and running that is fine for most people. If you have a single soundcard, and an asoundrc included to set up dmix by default, chances are, pulse is unnecessary for you (and will actively get in the way of things like Flash, wine, or certain other applications unless you get into some crazy asoundrc sorcery...good luck wading through the documentation).
At least when pulseaudio is installed by choice, at the time of that choice, information can be passed along to the user as to what considerations they may have when it comes to configuration. Including it by default continues the impression that "Linux in general is difficult and complicated and is best left to nerds". If that's the goal, then I'd say pulse is great for achieving it...other than the fact that it's often the nerds who have avoided using it altogether, and the noobs being stuck with it and only each other to ask for support. A clusterfuck if ever there was one.