I thought all systemd haters would have died by now due to old age. At this rare chance, I have a question: How did it feel to live together with actual dinosaurs?
I think it's largely a combination of curmudgeons that hate change and people who are strict Unix ideologues. systemd, while being objectively better in many ways is a monolith that does more than one thing. This violates some of the Unix program philosophies (small programs that do one thing). The truth is that the script-based inits were terrible for dependency management, which is something that systemd explicitly addresses and is probably one of its greatest strengths, IMO.
That's very fair. Having managed system services for custom application stacks with hard dependencies on one another, that strength is worth it to me.
I don't mean to come across as saying that the Unix philosophy is wrong. Just horses for courses. Systems where there is a likelihood of interdependent daemons should probably consider systemd. Where that's not an issue or complexity is low, more Unix-like inits can still be a solid choice because of their limited scoping and easy modification.
It's slow and heavy, and it does too many things. It's a monolithic piece of code so big it's getting too difficult to maintain, so it has more vulnerabilities than other alternatives. It's also taking over the whole system, to the point where Linux systems will soon be Systemd/Linux instead of GNU/Linux.
It's also developed and funded mainly by Microsoft, which is also something people don't really like. Microsoft are trying to make it similar to Windows in some ways, which makes it way more difficult to debug random errors.
And it doesn't follow the UNIX guidelines, which is just the cherry on top.
Perhaps because I don't use DEs my PCs boot up quickly, and servers aren't supposed to be rebooted outside their maintenance windows. So why would I care about pArAlLeL bOoTiNg.
The thing about parallel booting is it's only faster in systems with lots of cores, and the overhead of the parallelized code is sometimes enough to negate the benefits in older processors.
My machine is a Core 2 Duo lappy, which allows me to run most modern programs cheaply. However, it's slow (even though I don't use DEs either), and laptops are the kinds of computers you boot multiple times a day. That's why I care about boot times. And in this case, you can see that booting with a parallelized init system is slower than booting with a "regular" one.
Yeah, Systemd might be the new fad, but I still believe there are lots of things to learn from the simple init systems. After all, an init system should only focus on initializing a system, and it shouldn't be as complex and complicated as Systemd is.
I might be just another old man yelling at clouds. But hey, that makes two of us now.