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from the or-at-least-not-be-bothered-either-way dept.
[Ed's Comment: Not wishing to ignite yet another flame war regarding the adoption of systemd, I hesitated before publishing this story. However, although it is not an formal survey, it might still reflect the views of the greater linux user community rather than those who frequent this particular site. There is no need to restate the arguments seen over the last few weeks - they are well known and understood - but the survey might have a point.]
http://q5sys.sh has recenlty conducted a survey finding many Linux users may be in favour of systemd:
First off lets keep one thing in mind, this was not a professional survey. As such the results need to be taken as nothing more than the opinions of the 4755 individuals who responded. While the survey responses show that 47% of the respondents are in favor of systemd, that does not mean that 47% of the overall linux community is in favor of systemd. The actual value may be higher or lower. This is simply a small capture of our overall community.
Although the author questions the results could this be an indication that we're really seeing a vocal minority who don't want systemd while the silent majority either do or simply don't care? Poll results and the original blog post.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Friday November 21 2014, @02:36PM
As a long-time Slackware user, I must take exception to this. The Slackware community is by no means dead or dying. There's a vibrant user help forum at LinuxQuestions.org, where you can find, among more useful things, multiple flamewars about SystemD. The packages are generally quite recent, though the distribution follows a consciously conservative update policy, which might be mistaken for "stagnation". For instance, right now it uses GCC 4.8.3 instead of 4.9.2, and it hasn't switched to Python 3 yet (but it is tracking the Python 2.7 bugfixes).
There is a package auto-updater included, although it's completely optional and, unlike apt-get or rpm, won't force dependency updates on you. There are also 2 or 3 unofficial ones, including slapt-get, which is what I use. And just in the past 2 months or so I came across, through Google, no less than THREE new unofficial Slackware package repositories that seem to have basically come out of nowhere:
http://sotirov-bg.net/slackpack/ [sotirov-bg.net]
http://slackonly.com [slackonly.com]
http://ponce.cc/slackware/ [ponce.cc]
I have no idea where all these repos are coming from all of a sudden. Maybe they're a front for the NSA ;) This is in addition to slacky.eu and slackware.schoepfer.info, which have been around for a while. And then there's slackbuilds.org which is a "run these scripts and make a custom Slackware package just for you" site rather than an actual repository, but still.
As another indication of vibrancy, we've got derivatives: Arch Linux and VectorLinux are the most popular, but there are others. So yeah. Slackware's doing fine.
As far as Slackware switching to SystemD? I don't see it happening, personally, and certainly not in a way where you can't disable it if you want. Slackware's known for customizability, mostly by not being so obtuse that you can't figure out how to dig into the internals and tweak stuff if you have to.
Re SystemD: I really don't think an apocalypse is coming where you can't run any software without needing SystemD as your init. Many people -- including in the Slackware community -- fear this happening, but, well, almost all "Linux" software also runs on the BSDs, and MacOS, and Cygwin. None of those except Linux even have SystemD as an option for their init. It's traditional in the Linux community for software to be portable, across archs, OSes, and system configs. I don't see that changing.
PS this is random, but I just now discovered that pkgsrc -- NetBSD's "ports" repo -- supposedly works on any Linux distro, as well as Cygwin etc. I've never used it, ever, but it looks cool.