> Besides that it is pretty obvious that the standardization [..] has resulted in massive reduction of bugs and complexity. If that were true it would be easy

> Besides that it is pretty obvious that the standardization [..] has resulted in massive reduction of bugs and complexity. If that were true it would be easy to see the difference in outstanding bugs between distributions that adopted SystemD and those who haven't, since their bug-numbers would be orders of magnitudes larger. To my knowledge this isn't so. From a larger perspective you are arguing for the benefits consolidation and unification, as in 'If only we had one X (where X can be a Desktop Environment, GUI toolkit, Editor, etc), every developer could focus their effort on that, innovation would be quicker and adoption of the OS would be better (and we would finally have "the year of the desktop"). It is a pretty idea, to boost productivity through standardisation, but by now decades of free OS development (and proprietary OS development, to illustrate the value of mono-cultures and cathedral planning) have shown it does not work. As of now, SystemD adoption hinders the development of: -alternative cgroup managers -non-affiliated container development -DE development on non-linux systems -GNU running on alternative kernels -adoption and development of alternative init systems Now none of these directly affect the Desktop Experience, so many will not care. But standardisation is not necessarily a direct benefit, or even a net benefit from a larger--long-term--context, especially in the Free Software world.