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In reply to Comment by Reader trivia
Believe me, should be obvious from this thread, NOT using systemd would absolutely be the first choice for many of us.
Unfortunately, large numbers of us have -- through no choice of our own -- been forced to adopt it basically at gunpoint, as our corporate linuces have betrayed us (yes, we mean you RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, et al)...
Where we can, we are attempting to move to NON-systemd linuces (Alpine, Devuan, et cetera). Personally, I like many other features of RHEL/CentOS, but systemd may be a deal breaker. (Take note, RHEL. You're actively driving away part of your formerly-loyal installed user base.)
That being observed, no, every program with a bug is not 'defective by design'.
Systemd however, IS -- due to what's been pointed out repeatedly by many individuals, in many venues, upon many occasions. The fundamental underpinnings of the design philosophy is critically flawed, as it not only violates the first premise(1) of UNIX philosophy 'do ONE thing, and do it well', but completely files in the face of it.
An init system (e.g. 'system management loader') does NOT need to take over power management, to control mount points, to handle disk encryption, to manage DNS, to control host naming, or locale, or time management, to add cron-style scheduling, to manage the network interfaces, to control sockets or inetd, or manage login sessions, just to name a few of it's excesses.
Add to that, questionable design choices such as opting for binary logging instead of cleartext, and you're simply adding fuel to the already large pyre a great many of us would gladly toss systemd onto.
Does init.d have it's own flaws. You bet.
Are the intentions of those working on systemd well-meaning? Sure.
Are some of the design objectives good ones? Sure.
But, much more importantly, are the design decisions good? For the most part, certainly no.
Many are fundamentally flawed for many of the same reasons Gnome is a complete disaster. They are overreaching, overcomplicated, with a snowballing morass of poorly written code, a open disdain for modern coding best practices, and design creep that apparently will continue expand and try to take over the world -- though creep doesn't even begin to address the avarice with which systemd claws for control of things that it has no business controling.
Importing flawed, monolithic, Windows-style design concepts into Linux is a poison pill.
The design concepts that should be in use here revolve around KISS -- keep it simple, stupid.
Instead, systemd is an Ode to Zawinksi's Law.
I'm waiting for the day it's announced that systemd has added an email client...
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(1) Doug McIlroy, The Bell System Technical Journal, 1978
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