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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, @11:49AM
i'm still using sysvinit on a debian wheezy vm on my laptop, but when i eventually decide to dist-upgrade i might avoid systemd if it turns out to be as bad as folks are suggesting
i'll just make sure the init system i want is installed (sysvinit most likely since it has worked well) and avoid any packages that depend on the parts of systemd that i don't like. particularly with all the hatred of systemd, i can't imagine it will be hard to find alternatives to various systemd-dependent packages in a couple of years... "may the forks be with you!"
at the moment i use gnome (which i have discovered seems to have some dependency on systemd components on my system already) but if it gets to the point where gnome no longer serves my interests i'll probably switch to something like xfce (already using on my desktop).
there seems to be a lot of hype about systemd. i'm not sure what's true and what's fluff, but eventually it will all settle down and i might find some reasonably technical and objective breakdowns of the differences and similarities between various init packages. till then i'm not going to get too excited.
one of the strengths of linux has always been freedom of choice... there is little argument that corporate interests would aim to lock us in, but by the power of the almighty toe-cheese-infused gpl2, freedom will prevail.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @12:13PM
I'm writing this comment using a dinky Acer C720 chromebook running a systemd infected distro. It makes no difference to me in this case, the machine is nippy and boots to a shell prompt in just a few seconds. Overall, systemd is not something I need to mess with on this machine and the user experience is smooth. My definition of 'smooth' is perhaps different than most as I do almost everything from the shell (ie: login, su, systemd wifi-menu, package updates, exit su shell, startx).
I have no reason to object to systemd based on the experience of running it on this machine. On my servers though, systemd is a complete disaster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @12:27PM
can't imagine servers would have a big dependency on systemd... most debian servers would be better off sticking with tried and trusted sysvinit
gnome doesn't really have any business being on a server
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @12:36PM
GNOME 3 doesn't really even have much business being on a workstation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @02:38PM
Err, systemd logind and systemd networkd for starters and of course they have their own (much maligned) journald and are about to add dhcp and ntp daemons. If only there were a light weight alternative that started processes and kept itself the hell off the rest of the system. We could call it 'initd'.