I live in a major Indian city and 1 gig fiber up and down is $30. We've also got really good 4G/5G in most places. Also in the super remote areas WiMAX is (still) an option.
There's so much I disagree with in the beginning but the ending is what actually grinds my gears. You make it sound like systemd manufactured this monoculture somehow. This is also the point I've seen people throw in a comparison to some closed-source org with money to burn and questionable morals.
Systemd was chosen by distros and users across different communities because it solves hard problems better than the others. We can debate about why that is, but the maintainers of Systemd aren't running smear campaigns against other open source projects. Often systemd is the subject of such ire.
They chose to solve hard problems and people adopted it. It's not anything more sinister. It's definitely not an "un-auditable mess". It's written in well formatted C with structure, good tooling, and an open community. You can disagree with the ideology but that's open source for you.
Additionally and away from my point, I believe that Systemd won our because they chose to embrace some complexity to solve really hard problems. Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialisation by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.
Times change too. Microsoft does a ton of open source. They maintain an excellent immutable Linux distro. As always the true enemy is dogma and a cult-like adherence to it.
Agreed. I wonder how many people in this thread hating on systemd have actually tried to work with upstream. They are an extremely pleasant and welcoming community who are willing to work with you on the most trivial stuff.
Nah man you don't get it. They were "monetizing" Wayland. Whatever that means. It's certainly not because X is an insanely old and difficult to maintain codebase with questionable design decisions.
Without replying to specific parts, I'd like to point out that you and others bring up parallels between Systemd and closed source proprietary software shops like Apple and Windows. I view this as bad faith because Systemd should be afforded the kindness (and obviously has the user freedoms) of a fully open source work.
There's nothing apple-esque about any of this. 'If you're unhappy fork it', is a common adage that is definitely applicable here.