[eythian]

My feeling, without evidence, is that a lot of the hate is vocal people who don't like this thing that does stuff differently to what they're used to. I get the feeling, I still understand /etc/init.d and runlevel symlinks and /var/log better than systemd, but that's because I have many more years of experience interacting with it, breaking it, fixing it. Whenever I have to do stuff with systemd it's a bit annoying to have to go learn new stuff, but when I do I find it reasonably straightforward. Just different, and most likely better.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

A lot of the hate was because the main developers interactions wiht just about everyone was horrible, the code was opaque at best most of the time and constantly changed, scope creep, and the feeling that it was a massive power grab by Red Hat.

It can be argued that it didn't solve very many problems and added a huge amount of complexity.

[const_cast]

The problem with the complaints is that they're all made up. Well, except maybe developer interactions - assholes can be assholes.

systemd isn't opaque, it's open-source. systemd is objectively less opaque than init scripts, because it's very well documented. Init scripts are not.

Sure, you can read them. But then you'd realize that glued together init scripts just re-implement systemd but buggier and slower, at which point you might as well just read the systemd source. Or, better yet, the documentation.

systemd ALSO does not constantly change. The init system has been virtually untouched in a decade, save for bug fixes and a few new features. Your unit files will "just work", across many years and many distros. Yes, systemd is more portable than init scripts.

systemd ALSO does not have any scope creep. Here, people get confused between systemd-init, and systemd the project.

systemd-init is just an init system. Nothing more, nothing less, for a long time now, and forever. There is no scope creep, the unix principle is safe, yadda yadda yadda.

systemd coincidentally is also the name of a project which includes many binaries. All of those binaries are optional. They aren't statically linked, they're not even dynamically linked - they communicate over IPC like every other program on your computer.

systemd is also not complex, it's remarkably simple. systemd unit files are flat, declarative config files. Bash is a turing-complete scripting language with more footguns than C++. Which sounds more complex?

[strawhatguy]

yes, especially the scope and power creep, which is antithetical to what unix was all about. Which was doing one thing, and doing it well. What started as a neat way to start servers in parallel, as systemd handles the sockets, now can control your home directory. Like what?

[dpkirchner]

One of my earliest memories of using systemd involved logs being corrupted. journalctl would just say the file is corrupted but wouldn't even print the name of the file -- I had to resort to strace. That left a real bad taste in my mouth.

[antod]

My systemd grumpiness was mostly due to only just (nearly) finishing an upstart migration. The thought of another one so soon after wasn't fun, even if I liked some of the new features. Those days are over though, and I'm glad there's a mostly unified approach.