I have no gripe about the process. (Well, I don't think it was a technical decision, so it shouldn't have been dumped on the TC). It was pellucidly transparent. Exemplary, really.
I just really don't like systemd, so I'm sorry that it became the Debian default init. My gripe is with the outcome, not the process. Most package-maintainers must have disagreed with me. It's OK, I'm used to people not agreeing with me.
What tangible thing does systemd do that hurts your usage of the OS?
If I would hack into your computer, install systemd and set up a few clever aliases for your sysvinit commands, would you ever notice that I have done that?
I see this hard anti-systemd sentiment from some vocal people, but I have yet to see any actual problems that systemd has caused.
I know that systemd is not a POSIX standard, but neither is sysvinit.
> What tangible thing does systemd do that hurts your usage of the OS?
Well, binary logging, for a start. Usurping DNS.
Actually, let's not go down that path - it would be a long argument, and I've already lost it, years ago.
> would you ever notice that I have done that?
Umm, yes.
My case isn't that systemd is bad; it's that I objected to Debian making systemd the default init, and that it's not very easy to make a non-default init the active init. I have a preference, I don't think I have to justify it, but the Debian change made it hard for me to exercise that preference. That's all.
I always feel like journald was not fully complete before major distros swapped over to systemd. I like the problems it was trying to solve and I get the reasons journald went with a binary database file.
I’ve personally been burned multiple times at work by log monitors missing log messages due to logrotate. It isn’t often, but often enough I’m glad for the solution.
The thing that hurt was that they did all this work for better structured data and then the only remote logging solution (that was really usable) at the time was syslog. Remote logging has gotten better depending on what sort of central logging vendor you’re using.
Systemd broke my computers plenty of times; the closed logging system spread the logs into the things systemd managed and what the application manages; there were the DNS problems that Debian solved quickly; and the moronic timeouts, why fail a service in a second when you can keep retrying and increasing the timeout for 15 minutes, dragging the boot sequence and making sure nobody can fix the problem for all that time?
There were many more, but I don't write it down. Systemd is a horrible piece of software that solves a very important problem.
Not Devuan, normal vanilla Debian (and one Debian-Xen VM host).
There are instructions online for removing systemd; I think it is cause for regret that there isn't an install option and a commandline tool to "just do it". It's not tricky; it's just a nuisance that you have to do it at all.
[Edit] And a debconfig thing. It should be that easy to switch.
[Edit 2] I deserve to be voted down, I realise! I called for a change that I claimed was easy, without offering a patch! I should shut up, and my remarks should be very pale grey.
[Edit] I didn't mean the systemd thing lacked transparency; I just mean the result wasn't "nice".