Comment by serbuvlad
3 months ago
Yeah. Exactly. It's also how Wayland and Pipewire managed to win: by being backwards compatible with X and Pulseaudio, while also overcoming their shortcomings.
The problem is that if the only complaint with systemd is that it's too complex, any backwards compatible alternative will necessarily be as complex as systemd + the new thing (at least in terms of complexity of interface).
If there are actual technical deficiencies of systemd, then sure, maybe such a backwards compatible alternative might be in order.
Also, everything expands in time. Wine may have started out with many stubs, but now we're at the point of implementing Windows-y APIs in the kernel with the sole goal of improving wine performance (NTSYNC).
> The problem is that if the only complaint with systemd is that it's too complex
As I understand it, that isn't the only, nor even the main, complaint with systemd. On the contrary, the main complaint with systemd is that, like strangler vine (kudzu?), it's spreading everywhere, taking over functions that it originally had nothing to do with, and forcing ever more unrelated things to adapt to systemd -- thereby making them much less portable away from systemd; to something that doesn't use it.
It's like the old debate about "BTW, you should call it GNU/Linux, because..." is sooo yesterday: Nowadays it's systemd/Linux -- and well on its way to becoming systemd-OS, with the kernel a mere afterthought, soon to be if not replaced at least easily replacable. Sure, that may not bother you or most systemd fans, but one can't help wonder: Do you even realise that this is what you're condoning, or even actively advocating? Maybe it would bother you, if you realised it.
(Also, the whole "strangler vine" thing, when deliberately applied, used to have a name: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Now, I can't really swear that it is being deliberately applied here... But do we really dare to blithely assume it's just a coincidence that the creator of systemd so naturally found a home at the company the expression was coined for?)