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?
I have a suspicion that the other distros don't have AUR equivalents because they don't necessarily have as high standards for their users as arch does. Anyone could put anything they want in the package they upload to the AUR, and it's up to the user to verify the PKGBUILD and ensure that he can trust the source. Or even just read the comments. Such reliance on the user's good sense of analysis is not necesarily common outside of arch. I think other distros are content to give you a way to clumsily access user repositories while making sure that you know they in no way support this endeavour. They wouldn't want to integrate user repos the way arch does and then have to deal with clueless users screwing things up and blaming them for it.