Here’s something that’s both surprising and, in a way, not surprising at all, especially after yesterday’s announcement from KaOS, a distribution long known for its deep commitment to the KDE Plasma desktop, that it plans to move away from it. The main reason cited was KDE’s reliance on systemd in a specific component.
As expected, the news quickly gained traction, prompting KDE to clarify its dependence on systemd and which parts of the desktop environment rely on it. In a post on KDE’s Reddit community titled “A quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk ‘the KDE is forcing systemd!’ hoax“, the contributor described the claims as misinformation and provided a short FAQ clarifying the project’s position.
The truth is nobody is building an alternative to a bunch of great API that systemd just gives you for free.
Big “Firefox should just copy everything Google Chrome does” moment.
There isn’t “an alternative” to systemd because nobody who hasn’t drunk the kool-aid believes that anything like it should exist. The syslog, the cron daemon, the dns config, the log rotation, the ntp server, and even the init system should not all be part of one giant tangled mess of a project.
Then make a better alternative. You obviously “haven’t drunk the koolaid”.
Not every Linux user casually writes init systems. Not every Linux user is a programmer, even. Even less have competence at promoting their project so that it would be meaningfully adopted.
“Be the change you want to see” is cool and all, but Linux userbase can have opinions.
“Write the code I want, free of charge, in your own time. I demand it. Recognition for your efforts? Nah, I won’t even know of you, but if anything ever goes wrong, I will find your repo and complain about how Microslop did it better with hundreds of engineers!”
That’s what you sound like. If you don’t contribute code, money, documentation, detailed bug reports, community guidance, moderating, etc., then IMO, that opinion is worthless.
Devs aren’t your code monkeys, shackled to computers to do your bidding. A lot of thankless, unpaid time went into writing most of opensource code out there. To sit there and demand options is, to me, appallingly ignorant behaviour.
The Linux kernel is a tangled mess and not an alternative to the well designed HURD micro kernel.
Both compile much slower than the entirety of Plan 9.
Like many, back when it was fashionable I was open to the possibility of that idea being correct and I guess it’s still best to keep an open mind, but the results thus far suggest otherwise. Using Hurd is somewhat difficult for most purposes. Using cron rather than systemd timers on the other hand is much more pleasant and easy.
macOS runs on the Mach/xnu micro kernel and is pretty successful with it.
Didn’t read to me like OP was arguing for a single alternative.
In that case there are alternatives for each component, most often more than one, though they may lack here and there some feature you believe to be indispensable.