>The confusion is your own. You somehow came to believe that systemd is a project that only builds an init system.

Almost like systemd was pitched to solve the init problem, and then all this other crap winds up coming along for the ride? Naming a thing systemd-something does not remove that perfectly reasonable logical assumption that the thing that handles init is now handling something else.

Then again, I'm not the one that chose to start with an init system and then suffix all the other stuff I'm assimilating with the same name.

>That does happen some, but I think that's largely because the detractors of systemd constantly turn criticism of any small component to criticism of the whole thing.

Is nobody allowed to be concerned about the creeping monoculture?

>..rather the majority of systemd components are optional

"Optional" in the sense of if you want to compile your own system and run your own homegrown flavor of Linux, sure. Meanwhile, most people are going to be stuck with the defaults and the feature creep - and those defaults are what will matter when you go looking for help.

>I think the toxic cultural impact is a huge problem with systemd, but that impact came not from systemd, but from trolls around it, from people spreading FUD, etc.

First, you just did that thing we were talking about. It is possible to dislike systemd and its implications without being "a troll". Second, it's not the detractors that are responsible for Poettering et. al. 's general poor attitude towards everyone else's place in the ecosystem. That attitude was exemplified with the kernel message overflowing problem. It's exemplified when systemd maintainers open PRs to something like Tmux to put in systemd-specific code. It's exemplified when the maintainers pressure downstream distros to pressure the kernel devs. It's exemplified when they lie about compatibility promises. On and on and on. There's a wiki somewhere that I lost the link to that includes pages of this kind of crap happening again and again.

It's the attitude that turns people off, myself included. Systemd (the project) is not a good citizen, it is the thing that you should make allowances for and get out of the way of. I am not a fan of this style of political wheeling and dealing.

>Have you ever read syslog-ng's code? bind's? glibc's? Have you ever configured your network with rc scripts and hacks?

You mean the exhaustively documented "rc scripts and hacks" that existed on every distro pre-systemd and worked perfectly well on those distros? /etc/network/interfaces for Debianlikes, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/(interface-name).conf for Rhellikes. That's 90% of the server/desktop land covered.

The thing that is coming in to change everything is what needs to justify itself, not the other way around. Normally I'd be all for the technical merit by itself, but time spent learning/unlearning/troubleshooting/etc is a thing too. I work in a mixed Ubuntu environment since around 8.04ish, and lemme tell ya, unlearning ~10 years of muscle memory every time I want to tweak services on a 16.04 machine is a pain in the ass that causes curses on systemd's name regularly from a not insignificant amount of people.

The typical response to this is to insult people who dare bring up this concern as "backwards" or "old fashioned" (read: appeal to novelty). And I could put up with that change no problem if there was something objectively better about the replacement.

Yet, there is not. What I have works fine right now, and I gain no new benefits from all of this wheel-reinventing. Point to a tangible benefit. No, "universal network config" is not a tangible benefit in my book, because I don't see a Linux-wide monoculture as a positive.

>It's clearly better in some metrics in that distros have switched to it.

Argumentum ad populum. Once RHEL (which was a given since they're basically the corporate backer) and Debian bought in, the discussion was effectively over.

As to the rest of your post, yes, once you're in a position of power and can basically dictate standards that everyone else is pressured to follow (going as far as the Linux kernel wrt. kdbus), it makes sense to absorb as much as you can.

I'm not accusing Systemd (the people) of mendacity or evil. I'm accusing them of having a shitty, hostile attitude that I don't have a (meaningful) choice in avoiding unless I want to spend all my days reconfiguring stuff that wasn't broken in the first place. Most of the benefits systemd brings to the table just from an everyday server standpoint really aren't that huge at the end of the day, at least not anywhere near huge enough to justify the headache caused by its adoption.