Over time, I have come to think that systemd probably should have been two projects. One to replace init, watch services as they run, restart them if needed; if

Over time, I have come to think that systemd probably should have been two projects. One to replace init, watch services as they run, restart them if needed; if you get dependencies out of that, being able to start services in parallel sort of falls out of that for free, but I feel that few people really need that (OTOH, if it comes for free, it doesn't hurt, either). The other project could include all the rest, basically. Again, having a unified API for applications to e.g. get notified when the network connection changes, time changes or a USB flash drive is connected, or a new display, or whatever - that makes sense; having it effectively mixed in with the init system does not neccessarily. As a bonus, if it was an independent project, it might have been portable across different Unixoid systems. For reasons totally unrelated, though, I installed FreeBSD on the new home server I got recently, and it was a really pleasant experience. Plus I installed OpenBSD on an old laptop I saved from becoming landfill, which was fun, too. There are good reasons to like BSD even if one gets along with systemd just fine.