Comment by jart

Because Karen Sandler made it a hard dependency of GNOME, effectively forcing every distro to adopt it or give up GNOME. In Linux, parent processes hold dominion over all child processes, due to the way things like ptrace work. So it was a coup d'etat of the entire userspace. Then next thing you know, systemd took over the bootloader too, which gave it dominion over the kernel as well. Old school sysadmins don't like being dominated. Especially not by some useful stooge like he who shall not be named. The source code of his projects is open source in name only. Least hackable code imaginable. Almost like it's machine generated code to make the sources as opaque and inscrutable as possible. It uses binary formats to log data, exchange messages between processes, and other awful things to obfuscate its behaviors. Someone with zero gravitas shouldn't be reinventing the vision of Bell Labs and forcing their ideas on others through NGO policy changes. I'm surprised Trump hasn't signed an executive order banning it. Even the name itself, System D, expresses this arrogance, since it claims to be 100x better than UNIX System V, because D=500 and V=5 in roman numerals. Being forced to use this init system changed the workflow and daily lifestyle of every sysadmin. In one fell swoop they took an OS that's open, transparent, and owner controllable and made it into something more obtuse than Windows. And guess who the stooge works for? Microsoft! It's the sort of thing that would make people pivot their careers towards management or quit working.