There seems to be quite a controversy brewing over systemd. I was reading the debianfork.org site this morning and also the Wikipedia page. It seems to be a case of the old UNIX-way vs. a new, re-engineered way of the functionality of the init(8) process/program and how system booting and startup are managed.
I haven’t dug into this enough yet to understand all of the details of the arguments. The Wikipedia page makes it look like people with names I know were, at least initially, agin it.
I currently favor the Linux 12.04 Server edition and I’ll probably be looking to upgrade to 16.04 at some point. Will I be looking at some alternative, new fork of Linux by then? Or will I even be looking at Linux at all? That’s a good question. I may have two or three Mac Minis by then and that will be it. It could happen. System administration eventually gets old.
Mark Shuttleworth, the chief of Ubuntu, stamped the Debian decision on 2014-02-14 to go forward with Systemd. I’m not encouraged that his post title begins with the word “losing.”
Systemd on Wikipedia
debianfork.org
“Losing graciously” by Mark Shuttleworth
“Linus Torvalds and others on Linux’s systemd” by By Steven
J. Vaughan-Nichols on ZD Net
“Which init system for Debian?” by Jonathan Corbet on lwn.net, 2014-11-05