People are complaining that it's too big, labyrinthine, and arcane to audit, not that it doesn't work. They would prefer other things that work, but don't share those characteristics.
Also, the more extensive the remit (of this init), the more complexly interconnected the interactions between the components; the fewer people understand the architecture, the fewer people understand the code, the fewer people read the code. This creates a situation where the codebase is getting larger and larger at a rate faster than the growth of the number of man-hours being put into reading it.
This has to make it easier for people who are systemd specialists to put in (intentionally or unintentionally) backdoors and exploitable bugs that will last for years.
People keep defending systemd by talking about its UI and its features, but that completely misses the point. If systemd were replaced by something comprehensible and less internally codependent, even if the systemd UI and features were preserved, most systemd complainers would be over the moon with happiness. Red Hat invests too much into completely replacing linux subsystems, they should take a break. Maybe fix the bugs in MATE.
A shell script with a few defined arguments is not a complexly interconnected set of components. It's literally the simplest, most core, least-strongly-dependent interconnection that exists in a nix system.
Tell us you never bothered to understand how init worked before drawing a conclusion on it without telling us.
> Red Hat invests too much into completely replacing linux subsystems, they should take a break.
They should do whatever they feel is best for them, as should we. They're releasing free as in freedom GPL Linux software, high quality software at that. Thus I have no moral objections to their activities.
You have to realize that this is really a symptom of others not putting in the required time and effort to produce a better alternative. I know because I reinvent things regularly just because I enjoy it. People underestimate by many orders of magnitude the effort required to make something like this.
So I'm really thankful that I got systemd, despite many valid criticisms. It's a pretty good system, and it's not proprietary nonsense. I've learned to appreciate it.
Let’s not get started on how large the kernel is. Large code bases increase attack surface, period. The only sensible solution is to micro service out the pieces and only install the bare essentials. Why does the an x86 server come with Bluetooth drivers baked in?
The kernel devs are wasting time writing one offs for every vendor known to man, and it ships to desktops too.
Also, the more extensive the remit (of this init), the more complexly interconnected the interactions between the components; the fewer people understand the architecture, the fewer people understand the code, the fewer people read the code. This creates a situation where the codebase is getting larger and larger at a rate faster than the growth of the number of man-hours being put into reading it.
This has to make it easier for people who are systemd specialists to put in (intentionally or unintentionally) backdoors and exploitable bugs that will last for years.
People keep defending systemd by talking about its UI and its features, but that completely misses the point. If systemd were replaced by something comprehensible and less internally codependent, even if the systemd UI and features were preserved, most systemd complainers would be over the moon with happiness. Red Hat invests too much into completely replacing linux subsystems, they should take a break. Maybe fix the bugs in MATE.