Some people have had enough, and they've organized a boycott at "
http://boycottsystemd.org" to organize efforts. From the top: "
Disclaimer: We are not sysvinit purists by any means. We do recognize the need for a new init system in the 21st century, but systemd is not it." OK, that's enough to keep me reading. They outline twelve well-thought-out reasons systemd is dangerous, and a set of ways you can get involved, including refusing to use systemd distros, moving to slackware, crux, gentoo, BSD, and more. Here's just one of them:
systemd clusters itself into PID 1. Due to it controlling lots of different components, this means that there are tons of scenarios in which it can crash and bring down the whole system. But in addition, this means that plenty of non-kernel system upgrades will now require a reboot. Enjoy your new Windows 9 Linux system! In fairness, systemd does provide a mechanism to reserialize and reexecute systemctl in real time. If this fails, of course, the system goes down. There are several ways that this can occur9. This happens to be another example of SPOF.
Interesting times. When's the last time you heard someone advocate moving immediately to Slackware or Gentoo?
My best example is this weekend's point of frustration: I've got a trackball with two extra buttons. How to configure them? Google it and you'll quckly find out the answer is currently: there is no way. Oh wait, you can install btnx. No, that is now deprecated. Or you can install some other 3rd party daemon thing that comes with no documentation. C'mon, guys!
The worst is, for an opensuse user, is there used to be a slick utility called sax2 that did phenomenal work configuring X11 for you back when it was X11. The move to x.org broke that and they never updated it. There /is/ something called sax3 now but it segfaults as soon as it starts.
That means, despite all the eyecandy, the version of opensuse I used back in 2004 was more useful to me in practical purposes. I'd argue the move from KDE3 to KDE4 is the same story: yes, better in terms of flash and maybe in terms of potential, but KDE3 as a desktop basically gave me better options and got me working faster.
C'mon people: 5 button mouse, make it work.