Wow this thread has a life all its own!
The fact that systemd offloaded a lot of work for distro maintainers was probably the main motivation for its adoption. Distro maintainers are lazy.
I find that statement mildly offensive. If you look back over the last couple of years, the work VastOne has put into this distro is anything but lazy. I mean, VastOne is regularly rolling out new ISO's every 2 weeks! (yes I realize the guy is being cheeky) I do agree that in offloading much of the work, systemd seemed cool and easily used. I suppose that should have terrified us the most in the first place. It is a growing monster that doesn't seem to be slowing down, and if anything, growing more intrusive every day.
uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far
While it made for interesting reading, and sounds like it would be great, at present there is only
one dev for uselessd. How long before he tires of the wonderful work he's done? Then what...
To be quite fair, we advise against using GNOME altogether.
bwahahahahaha

Any other viable sysvinit alternatives?
We mentioned nosh above, which looks like it has the most potential to be a systemd killer. It is, however, in desperate need of support and publicity.
Otherwise, plenty. “systemd or sysvinit” is a false dichotomy. We list some at http://boycottsystemd.org.
uselessd is meant to address the issue of using systemd without intrusive functionality and feature creep, with portability in mind, and coherent, conservative design principles and focus. We never expected initd to become this controversial, but ultimately it did. Getting out of this mess won’t be pleasant, but the Linux userland is known for its highly iterative and constantly evolving/recycling nature. Alternatives are bound to gain more traction, and the systemd interface replacements will likely speed up the process.
Either way, we see the whole debacle having a fate similar to HALd and devfsd, but with a stronger backlash.
Agree! But wait, there's more!
systemd is designed to be perpetually rolling software, not all that different from a kernel in user space, as was elucidated in a 2014 GNOME Asia talk. It has no clearly defined purpose beyond that other than the vague “basic building block to make an OS from”, though vagueness is probably a feature in of itself to justify intrusive functionality. The systemd developers don’t see software as a solution, they see it as a zero-sum game. A battle after battle to be won.
The end goal appears to be the creation of what we dub a Grand Unified Linux Operating System (GULOS) and the destruction of the Linux distribution altogether beyond cosmetic changes. GnomeOS, in particular. The latter is actually a thing that GNOME aspire to accomplish.
Very succinctly said! Last weekend is a great example of the above quote.
Thanks for the post ozi, it was a good read. Proof that systemd is still the "elephant in the room"...
@statmonkey, great post, especially
or systemd hangs itself on it's own petard.
Truly you are a great word-smith!!!