this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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If you shoot the competitors and reject questions and dissent, then you win. Good job, IBM !
Didn't expect this topic to still be that controversial... Maybe I'm too young to know, but how was IBM involved?
Ibm owns red hat
Here we go again with the conspiracy bullshit
Its not, though. The chain of events is well documented, with much of the original correspondence still there to read and evaluate for yourself. Its arguably not a conspiracy, either, since it was perpetrated by a single entity.
Their motivations for doing it are the subject of a lot of speculation, some of it pretty wild, but the facts that they did do it and how it was done are public record.
No, see the reasoning why distros switched, e.g. Debian or Arch. TL;DR: technical merit, no good alternatives existed at the time, as evidence by how the Arch maintainer paraphrased the average systemd critic:
Would the landscape be more diverse if other people would have built someone when Poettering first announced systemd? Probably! Did anyone do it? No! OpenRC wasn't a fully fledged alternative back then, Upstart had fundamental design flaws.
But does anyone regret adopting systemd? Also no! Everybody is happy. It's robust, it works, it makes admin lives easier. Users no longer have to deal with zombies, slow boots, and unnecessary services running.
Bro I'm not making a single claim about the merits or flaws of systemd. I'm talking about the huge infighting and strong arming that went on back when it came out. I had an LTS server back then and just had my popcorn out to watch, since I don't have the programming expertise to weigh the pros and cons of init systems at a philosophical level.