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Controversy is nothing new when it comes to systemd. Many people find this new Linux init system to be inherently flawed in most ways, yet it is still gaining traction with major distros like Arch Linux, openSUSE, Fedora, and soon both Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux. The adoption of systemd for Debian 8 "Jessie" has been particularly fraught with strife and animosity.
Some have described the systemd adoption process as having been a "coup", while others are vowing to stick with Debian 7 as long as possible before moving to another distro. Others are so upset by what they see as a complete betrayal of the Debian and open source communities that there is serious discussion about forking Debian. Regardless of one's stance toward systemd, it cannot be argued that it has become one of the most divisive and disruptive changes in the long history of the Debian project, threatening to destroy both the project and the community that has built up around it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @10:32AM
First off there isnt really a single init, we talk about SysV but that's just a specification and everyone made their own slightly different implementation. Some are better than others. There are also a whole new generation e.g. runit s6 finit openRC monit dmd and others that enable the same sorts of additional features that systemd does.
The difference is that systemd has powerful corporate backing, and it keeps rolling up other aspects of the system, completely outside of the scope of an init system, which it then alters. Embrace, extend, extinguish - well systemd is classic extend. Journald is required, and it uses a binary file format for logging, which is ridiculous and unacceptable. It's eaten consolekit, it's eaten udev, and it's getting harder and harder to work around it.
A couple of differences between it and the alternatives; working with existing tools versus requiring reinvented tools, and being designed to work with arbitrary components versus requiring unrelated components all be selected as a block.
One more difference - a corporation funding development and pushing adoption. Now why on earth would free software people let anyone *push* us to adopt something? Have we really learned nothing?
This [coreos.com] is what it is about - and in a nutshell you could say it's Android for server farms.