Yeah, but in the same way, Arch empowers linux developers, glibc developers and many other developers of unreplacable Arch linux parts. This argument is quite pointless I’m afraid…

openSUSE has to lug a lot of baggage around because of it’s affiliation with novel / SUSE enterprise, and while it’s a great distro, this makes things more difficult & complex than i care for.

came to arch only recently, and for a while i couldn’t believe my luck: without using [testing] at all, i get a system that’s pretty much ‘bleeding edge’ and stable at the same time. until now i was holding my breath, expecting the whole thing to come crashing down around my ears eventually, but it doesn’t!

and congrats to your style as well. you won’t find replies like this on openSUSE. there, everything has to be vetted by lawyers and the novel mothership before it gets published.

my advice: stop worrying about those anti-systemd trolls; there’s nothing to discuss anymore. ban them from the mailing list, or just ignore their posts, whatever comes easiest. don’t waste your time or drive your blood pressure into orbit; isn’t worth it.

After 10 years of Windows and then trying what seems like every distro under the sun “The Arch Way” is now my way, I am home.

Just a quick comment to say thumbs up! I also find it very hard not to reply to trolls and spend far too much time and energy getting worked up about it when I could just set an ignore on IRC and be done with it.

We’ve had surprising little opposition to systemd in Mageia. The current release (Mageia 2) uses systemd by default and Mageia 3 is systemd only and I’m loving removing some of the old cruft and getting a much neater and easier to understand system.

I find that in pretty much all the cases the people complaining are simply joining the bandwagon without any kind of proper technical research. As I know Lennart quite well, I knew he was working on the systemd project for a long time before it was announced, but I certainly didn’t assume it was awesome. I spend several hours reading the very informative blog posts and documentation created for the project before making up my own mind. Obviously I’m not a big supporter of it and I struggle to understand people who don’t feel the same.

Lennart seems to have the right attitude to the nay-sayers. Just ignore them! The only issue with that is that occasionally you’ll get valid bug reports that do need fixing, but they are done in such a trollish way that it really puts you off trying to help. I had one like this just the other day with the guy spouting a whole bunch of bullshit about systemd, it’s documentation and Lennart himself. I did engage the troll for a while, but it was going nowhere. I took a deep breath and did end up investigating the issue… where was the bug? polkit (primarily because of our half transition to logind rather than consolekit in Mageia 2 due to still supporting sysvinit. Lennart’s fault? No, not at all, but that doesn’t stop him or his projects getting blamed.

Anyway, that’s some of my own steam being let off too now!

Kudos on the xkcd reference, love it! Keep up the good work!

You have arrived at the only right and meaningful conclusion:
systemd – “It will not save the world. It will not eat your children either.”

Some comments:

“A final message to the people who keep complaining” and “We don’t care”

Bravo. THIS – IS – OSS. Don’t like it? Leave it, fork it, don’t bother me anymore (or do commit beneficial changes even though you forked… whatever).
Still, this sounded harsh. You know why? People, and I, love “Arch” (that is the philosophy – i still hate stuff about Arch, but that’s stuff I would get with other distros, too).
I would hate to see “it” lose it’s way – even though of course anyone could adopt the way and make a new distro (and even use yours as a starting point at any time).

Let those who say that they’ll jump ship because of system jump ship, but: remember the way!

“without unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications”
The point of Arch I love the most.
Other Distros impose their brand on software, you try not to – keep it up (or I might actually try and jump ship – this is what brought me, and probably countless oters, to Arch).

“Complexity without complication.”
At the moment, you might be doing “the right thing” in choosing systemd, as dodging it adds complexity.

“Arch Linux targets and accommodates competent GNU/Linux users by giving them complete control and responsibility over the system.”
“By keeping the system simple, Arch Linux provides the freedom to make any choice about the system.”

What I don’t like about this decision is that it empowers the systemd developers and the systemd ecosystem.
I would not mind this if I hadn’t had the gut feeling that “systemd” will try to make many parts of the system’s software dependent on it.
There might come a point where you simply can’t live without systemd (e.g. replace with your init, log whatever of choice). I’d hate to see that.
systemd might still eat your children in the future.

Some minor complaints about your arguments:

Shared libraries: You pit them against Pipelining simple programs.
Your argument should be: Libraries
Shared or static, benefits are the same imho. Static relies on build-time (packager) work, dynamic mostly on run-time work (loader).

Don’t hate on The Unix Way. Programs which need IPC can use other mechanisms than “cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3″.
Imo they should use that way though if data is interesting for users to use, or if it can be desirable to “filter” the data.