To me, one of the greatest weaknesses of OpenBSD (and I say this as an avid OpenBSD user) is not having a system manager like solaris smf or systemd. Launchd is

To me, one of the greatest weaknesses of OpenBSD (and I say this as an avid OpenBSD user) is not having a system manager like solaris smf or systemd. Launchd is a pain to configure, so I don't really consider it a solution. Opting out of systemd is hard because systemd is the only package which actually solves these problems reliably, and is enthusiastically maintained. Logind is the only maintained implementation of ConsoleKit. xinetd works fine, but it operates outside the loop of the system manager, which makes socket activated services harder to monitor and configure and prevents them from being started before xinetd itself. Say what you will, but systemd is relied upon because if they didn't rely on it, the functionality they need would not be found elsewhere. I think these are all growing pains. As the system gets more complex, we are starting to realize that we can't afford to maintain two or three wrappers and sets of configs for the device manager process; we can't afford to maintain a handful of different metadata-enhanced logging systems in each daemon; we can't afford to maintain adapters and configs for a bunch of login managers. This is exactly the same kind of pain which made portable UNIX an overnight commercial success. People yearned not to have to maintain a port for every computer they run on. Today they yearn not to have to have to ask five daemons different questions for the same answer.