[kodah]

I've been using systemd for a while, which I'm surmising is what you're referring to when you say controversial, and it's frankly not a diminished experience for someone that wants a consistently working desktop. The amount of things I used to have to hack into my OS were substantial, these days they're nearly nil and applications have common interfaces to plug into.

I'm not sure what, if anything, I materially gave up other than that all of those components have a contracted API now so all future components will need to adhere to that API.

[badrabbit]

Systemd is a big one, a diminished experience is not the issue, deviance from core unix principles and chasing market share instead of pleasing existing users was the big problem i observed.

For example, OpenRC had comparable boot times as did systemd and it was modern and stuck to the "do one thing" principle. Systemd was chosen because lennart and corporate/rhel people who have influence and a financial interest in expanding market share pushed it. Just like how things are done at apple and microsoft.