Because I left Windows precisely to avoid the kind of shittery that systemd is doing.
It's absolutely no coincidence that the people who have developed the stuff that's brought the most degradation to Linux - systemd, PulseAudio, Gnome's "user has no right to themes" attitude - all come from a Microsoft background or explicitly work for Microsoft.
I'd have far less of a problem if systemd was split into more practical, actually independent things that actually worked and distros didn't buy their snake oil so easily. But for the time being, to me, the systemd experience is pretty much like the PulseAudio experience, what with the whole "waiting 120 seconds for a network interface to activate that it's not going to because it's the damn ethernet port and I'm on the road so the cable is not connected, stupid letter-potter dipshit".
System-d has better logging. Until you have something that needs to really really log. You can argue that if you have something that's that dependent on logging it shouldn't be logging through the console but it's worked fine for decades. Auto pruning of logs isn't necessarily ideal. Getting console logs and assist logs as a pain in the ass.
Same goes for service dependencies we had this sorted it was answered via run levels and naming. It wasn't necessarily the most elegant solution but it was simple and there was very little to go wrong.
The tools to manage the services and logs are needlessly complicated. Service start, service stop, service status, service log, service enable, service disable. And I shouldn't have to reload the Daemon every time I make a change.
This isn't to say that it's all bad. It's flexible, and for most workflows, it's very automated and very light touch. The other pruning on the log file says probably saved a lot of downtime, a whole lot of downtime.
It's really well suited to desktop.
Service creation is somewhat easier.
Dependencies are more flexible than run levels.
To be honest I wouldn't go out of my way to run in a non-system distro but I would feel a little sigh of relief if something I was screwing with was still init.d
The kernel is already monolithic enough without adding another piece of monolithic software that everything depends on. IMO the Unix philosophy means we should have interchangeable parts.
There's some amount of user error here but when I did use systemd I had a hard time turning off services I didn't want because they were in the wants-to-have entry of other services. It's like a separate config area to maintain with a specific maintenance tool software instead of flat files.
I'm unfortunately using distros with systemd now tho.
I'm not an anti-systemd extremist. I use Void because it is a simple distro that doesn't break as often as Arch does, while also being very up-to-date.
I do have some things I dislike about systemd though which is why I will continue avoiding it in the future.
It doesn't follow the Unix Philosophy. This is a big problem for me, I want to be able to switch out different parts of my system as I please. Systemd is a collection of projects that are all so deeply integrated that you can't use them without also running the Systemd init system. And now Desktop Environments are starting to depend on Logind for example and there's no alternative for non-systemd users. (Except Elogind but that's just Logind ripped out of SystemD)
It's bloated and has many features I don't use. I just need an init system to start all my services at boot and restart them if they fail. Nothing more
Also using a Distro without Systemd is not really that hard
Sysvinit on gentoo here. Its so simple and clean, all can be managed and hacked via bash scripts.
I see no benefits in my use cases for systemd. Boot speed is unneeded, service auto-restart is done via Monit, anything else I don't need.
This is true for all my server -and- all my workstations and laptops as well.
Systemd never solved a problem needed to be solved to start with.
Now that it also does coffee and cream for you, i start seeing some benefits like auto-restart services. Was it worthwhile? Meh, dunno.
At first it seemed another case of "I am too young and I want stuff done my way just because" and redhat shoved it down everybody throath to gain marked dominance. That they did.
At least now systemd looks like mature and finally start making sense. I was even contemplating testing a migration on one server.
Then I remembered, I like freedom of choice and keeping up being an old fart, so I didn't (yet).
(No, for Wayland and network manager I think they are both welcome and needed from the start).
It didn't help the main Dev suckass attitude, that didn't made friends.
First, I don't like people promoting systemd. I don't need it more than other init systems. It's about picking the right group.
Second, I want a simple distribution so I use Void, which famously uses runit. It's about being lazy.
Third, I don't like the idea of it sprouting dependencies which it shouldn't. It's about paranoia. See recent news with a backdoor which wouldn't work if not for this.
I was trying different distros to replace my Zorin, I tried NixOS (didn't like the setup), GoboLinux (really like the idea, but it's very buggy). I ended up using EndevoursOS (arch btw) and I really love pacman/AUR, but I'm still not married to it
I actually don't remember why I lost my patience and just tried Void then (4 years ago). Maybe had something to do with installing a Linux on a laptop after using only FreeBSD for some time, and sound setup and brightness control being confusing (actually everything in Linux is more clumsy and messy, so wanted a simple distribution).
Debian I like, but it has a bit older versions of packages, as everyone knows, and also kernel versions, thus hardware support.
Fedora - I don't like the culture.
OpenSUSE - I like it, but didn't bother back then and now why change anything.
Arch - I don't like the idea of regularly solving problems which can be avoided by maintainers. AUR is attractive. The culture of clueless people proud of the fact that they installed Arch is a bit irritating.
Gentoo and Funtoo - I like them, but time spent on compilation could be used better.
Slackware - my favorite distribution, but it's a bit manual, so even more chores than with Arch. I think I might try it again.
And also Void has something just a bit similar to FreeBSD ports. I'd prefer it to be a real ports collection like in CRUX (which I might try some day), and I use pkgsrc anyway for such things now.
One thing that is really annoying me in AUR is how frequently thing break. Just the other day I had to tweak my settings because Hyprland pushed a breaking change.
If so that was fun, I updated my hyprland / hy3 flakes and I was bombarded by flashing red notifications indicating I'd caused Satan to return. Trawling through all my hyprland Configs I eventually put an end to the chaos.
If not, I guess I'll find out next time I update my flakes lol.
Aren't you talking about systemd-boot which is optional anyway? systemd covers the Linux init process which should have nothing to do with dual booting, no?
Systemd is an init system (the first process that manages/runs everything else). However it does far more than a traditional init system; arguably it's tendrils are all over mainstream Linux now.
GLIBC is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. It is a wrapper around system calls of the kernel for application use.
To be fair, I don't think systemd is classified as just an init system anymore. It's a software suite that just "conveniently" happened to have an init system included.
I agree, some of us just want a simple init system that isn't millions of lines of code and to be able to pick our own parts to use in a UNIXY fashion - If it ain't broke why fix it...
For example on my alpine system I have acpid, crond, dhcpcd, openntpd, seatd, udev, wpa_supplicant as services that systemd would replace.
