Comment by dralley
4 hours ago
The systemd init isn't half an operating system any more than the coreutils "ls" utility is half a userspace. The systemd project has many different components but they're independent, they are not all literally part of the init system.
You're the one who brought up init systems. Like you said, systemd is a huge project; an init system is just one of its components.
> he systemd project has many different components but they're independent
They _are_ dependent. It's one codebas, and even if you somehow separated it - you would still only have systemd-specific, systemd-dependent replacements for _actual_ independent components.
They all depend on systemd and won't work with anything else, nor on any other operating system either.
This is the post I responded to
>> The proof this site is misnamed is that a post criticizing systemd gets downvoted, probably by people who have never questioned why an [[ init system ]] needs to become half the operating system.
So no, I didn't bring it up.
I find the whole argument kind of dumb anyway. People talk about this as if it was a violation of the "Unix Philosophy" when Unix and BSD are developed even moreso in the same way - the init system is sitting in the same repo as the libc, the kernel, and the entire rest of the OS. Linux is alone amongst operating systems in making core system components swappable like to that degree in the first place. It's fine to like that kind of flexibility, but a bit silly to act as though that approach is fundamentally superior. If you want to use non-systemd tools, use a non-systemd distro, that is your choice. Just quit whining about 99.9999% of the other software users on the planet not catering to it.