I’m against the systemd monopoly; the lack of choice on most major distros while other init systems are perfectly fine for the majority of users; as a consequence against the perhaps unintentional incorrect narrative that systemd is the only reasonable/modern option.
I do agree that in this thread you do are pressing into the “not anti” image. This being said that was not the case prior to this thread.
Also there is no systemd “monopoly”. Systemd was chosen by volunteers at community centric distros like Arch and Debian, as well as by more corp distros like Redhat or Ubuntu.
Those distro maintainers (volunteers and paid) looked at all the options and chose what they thought was best.
Those maintainers also chose not to support alternative startup systems for the same reason why VW does not offer alternative chassis options on the VW Golf. (In this example the engine would be the kernel)
Aka the maintainers don’t want to massively increase the workload they would need to do. Volunteer community distros only have a limited amount of resources and choose to allocate them how they will.
Corpo distros just are being corps and want to save money.
Using the term “monopoly” in this context dismisses the Linux community’s choice as developers and contributors. The Linux community is unique in that we are both the producers and consumers of the community project.
I’m against the systemd monopoly; the lack of choice on most major distros while other init systems are perfectly fine for the majority of users; as a consequence against the perhaps unintentional incorrect narrative that systemd is the only reasonable/modern option.
systemd has flaws, but I’m not anti.
I do agree that in this thread you do are pressing into the “not anti” image. This being said that was not the case prior to this thread.
Also there is no systemd “monopoly”. Systemd was chosen by volunteers at community centric distros like Arch and Debian, as well as by more corp distros like Redhat or Ubuntu.
Those distro maintainers (volunteers and paid) looked at all the options and chose what they thought was best.
Those maintainers also chose not to support alternative startup systems for the same reason why VW does not offer alternative chassis options on the VW Golf. (In this example the engine would be the kernel)
Aka the maintainers don’t want to massively increase the workload they would need to do. Volunteer community distros only have a limited amount of resources and choose to allocate them how they will.
Corpo distros just are being corps and want to save money.
Using the term “monopoly” in this context dismisses the Linux community’s choice as developers and contributors. The Linux community is unique in that we are both the producers and consumers of the community project.
I would recommend reading this mailing list announcement thread to get a better understanding. The Linux from scratch dev team explains why they went from offering a choice to a “monopoly”. https://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/arc/lfs-announce/2026-02/msg00000.html
Edit: The announcement is wrong in that KDE in fact does not require systemd.