I simply need something less … self integrated to work with. With systemd it can be a real pain when you need to do something different with a lot of things. Take for example udev. It’s neat, everything relies on it now, but systemd’s implementation, the official implementation, is kinda trash.

If you for instance run a distro in a chroot (I realize this may be niche to most people, but its critical for me) systemd’s udev is useless. So you replace it with eudev or in my case libudev-zero, All is hunky dory except that in nearly every distro, libudev is directly mixed with systemd init, if you use systemd, you use libudev.

And yes, This is indeed fundementally a packaging issue, and ofc I can rebuild/repackage systemd to not provide udev, I’ve done it before, and probably will again. But these are the kind of issues I wind up running into and so many more. If it was a one off kinda thing then it would be fine, annoying but fine, but sadly for me it just isn’t.

I do actually like systemd as an init system, I just wish it didn’t do everything else, At one point I had high hopes for rustysd a service manager capable of running systemd services but development seems to have stopped.