Story

... is the answer to the question:

> When's the last time you heard someone advocate moving immediately to Slackware or Gentoo?

That was when Debian decided to go for systemd. I switched to Gentoo. Debian remains on weak machines on which I do not want to compile every program, but I pinned systemd so that it should not ever get installed.

By the way, I had switched to Debian when Arch went systemd. What a joke that was: "don't worry, I promiss the regular init scripts will be maintained, you need not oppose systemd as default, do not be afraid, let us do" said one lead Arch developper. Less than 3 months later, he announced traditional init scripts would not be maintained any more. And he now works at RedHat! Really funny...

I considered and still consider moving to *BSD. But 20 years of Linux (15 years as main/only system) are a bit difficult to wipe. Dual booting is a bit annoying because *BSD and Linux do not support really well a common filesystem. Maybe running Linux in a VM on a BSD like some people run Windows in a VM on Linux, for the few applications requiring Linux. But I have the feeling that virtualisation software is not as well developped on *BSD as on Linux.

What worries me too is that, as someone else already pointed it, systemd seems like a shiny symptom of the tendancies of the last 5 or 10 years. Bloat, complexification, over-automatisation, hiding more and more stuff from the users (and from admins now), novelty for novelty, bad documentation (and never up-to-date because everything is changing too quickly), corporatisation (most pieces of software have been taken over by big corporations(RedHat, Canonical, Google, Apple, Oracle, Intel...), there is not much left to hobbyists, students, universities researchers). Basically all the things that I could complain about under Windows during the 90's and early 2000's and that made me enjoy and switch to the refreshing Linux. And I am afraid those tendancies would slowly contaminate the BSDs, starting with FreeBSD/PC-BCD.