To start off with: Maybe I'm not on the same page, but your tone feels quite aggressive to me right now. I'm not telling you that you're wrong for choosing to use the software that you use. This isn't a flamewar, I'm not trying to tell you to do different things. I'm just explaining why the OP's criteria for an init manager don't apply to me.

It's also 3am my time, and I've had quite a bit to drink. If anything in my post comes off as aggressive, please let me know and I'll edit it in the morning.

> And sysvinit wasn't pretty much a monocultur?. I mean even OpenRC is basically sysvinit with a lipstick.

No. OpenRC is very happy sitting on top of busybox init instead of sysvinit.[0] When I encountered problems with my gentoo system built on musl (instead of glibc, #1 source of problems) and busybox (instead of coreutils #2 source of problems, and sysvinit #3 source of problems) they got fixed. A major part of why OpenRC is what it is is to prevent reinventing sysvinit/busybox's wheel.

> event handling is something that many systems today do need and I think we should try to optimize for the common use case.

> As for you not needing logind/consolekit, sure, if security is not a concern on a system, they're not needed, but again, that's not true for most systems.

Security is a concern on all of my systems, however, I do not agree that logind/consolekit add any security (at all) to most systems, or that they add substantial security to a small minority (say 5%) of systems. I would wager that 95+% of all linux systems are one of the following: A) no one is permitted access to any hardware, (video/sound/input) (headless systems, ie server farms, multiuser systems in a university, etc) B) single user account systems, (ie, my laptop. If someone has write access to my .bashrc file, they might as well have root access, and consolekit/logind can't bandaid anything by limiting access to my video device hardware) or C) hpc compute farms. (where the assumption is that all processes have god given write access to the GPUs) In the first class of systems, consolekit/elogind do not add security because all accesses are blocked, (in fact, the existence of consolekit/elogind simply expands the attack surface, making it less secure) in the second class no security is added because the video card is a more difficult attack vector than editing all the common home scripts, in the third class no security is added because whitelist-asterisk-to-video-card is the only sane configuration policy.

logind/consolekit are super awesome for eg educational institutions which have computers with multiple seats. Have four schoolchildren sitting at four monitors and four keyboards attached to one desktop computer? Sweet. (actually most schools use chromebooks now, which last I checked uses OpenRC) It's great that projects like consolekit/elogind exist to support those groups. But pretending like that's a common usecase, or pretending that sysvinint can't support those usecases- stop.

> GNOME etc. also don't really have a hard dependency on systemd, they depend on logind, which does not necessarily require systemd and indeed GNOME ships on Gentoo, Void etc.

This statement is, at best, disingenuous. If you want to install Gnome on Gentoo, you need to do one of two things: install systemd (Gentoo supports systemd as a first.point.five class citizen (my terminology))[1] or install elogind. elogind is a Gentoo specific forked version of systemd with everything that is not logind-related removed.[2] This code is still all upstream systemd code, and there is not a meaningful path towards an independent fork, the way busybox init exists independently of sysvinit, or syslog-ng exists independent of syslogd, or xorg-x11 exists independently of XFree11.

The fact that non-systemd installations of Gnome can possibly exist on Gentoo is a result of Gentoo developers going above and beyond the call of duty, despite barriers placed by the systemd team. And non-linux posix systems, eg FreeBSD - forget it.

> It's also not like the GNOME devs are stupid and got tricked into depending on logind or something.

I have nothing but respect for the Gnome team. I never implied anything of the sort. I am disgusted by your insinuation. Please walk this statement back.

I think that many of the things that the systemd monolith has to offer are valuable. If systemd were a federated constellation of small daemons speaking a reasonably stable API that didn't all have hard dependencies on each other, I would probably be quite happy with it. The problem - again - with systemd is the unforgiving, colossal monolith. I don't have the privilege of dipping my toes into the good parts without having to swallow whole the bad parts. And the bad parts are disgusting. (this is the same problem I have with Microsoft Windows) Modularity is a good thing; systemd is the antithesis of that.

[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC#Replacing_init

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd

[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Elogind