The traditional init systems suited me just fine, i saw no need to change them. If they were so bad, then they could've been fixed or replaced.

The migration to systemd felt forced. Debian surprised everyone with the change. Also systemd's development is/was backed by corporate Red Hat, their lead developer wasn't exactly loved either and is now working for Microsoft. Of course Canonical's Ubuntu adopted it as well. Overall feels like Windows' svchost.exe, hence people accusing it of vendor lock-in.

It's not just an init system, it's way waaay more. It's supposed to be modular, but good luck keeping only its PID1 in a distro that supports systemd. It breaks the "do one thing right" approach and, in practice, does take away choice which pisses me off.

I had been using Debian since Woody, but that make me change to Gentoo on my desktop which, to me, took the best path: they default to OpenRC but you're free to use systemd if you want to. That's choice. For servers i now prefer Slackware and the laptop runs Devuan whenever i boot it up.

To be fair systemd hasn't shown its ugly face in the Ubuntu VMs i'm forced to use at work.

YMMV. If you're happy with it, fine. This, of course, is only my opinion.

God damn I'd forgotten about Plymouth

Why do people keep insisting on capitalizing it wrong? It's systemd, all lowercase. Never has it been Systemd, and never has it been SystemD.

Systemd is tolerable but it still messes up my day. I'm moving away from it soon.

The idea was sound, the implementation not so much.

no

I can't like it bc its complicated.

I am on Guix works great with shepherd.

Boot times aren't really an issue and not really relevant to good vs bad. You should be able to rice each one for speed on your particular use case if you really want to.

Be wary of anything you get from RedHat. I use their stuff sometimes but ensure I can happily live without gnome, systemd, pipewire, wayland or whatever else they are generously gifting to us freeloaders.

Not against systemd (although it’s bad and needs replacing), just against pottering.

1. systemd hasn't become a better project built by better, smarter people to deliver a better set of features. It's still hot garbage.
2. it's okay to continue pointing out it's hot garbage, in the hopes we can go forward or back or just get on something better/else (same thing).

The problem of systemd is that it hasn't been just a replacement of init as they initially claimed, and now deny they ever did. Things like Mono, Gnome and systemd are bad for the ecosystem long term.

An init done by constructive people wouldn't be a problem at all.