Bundling. systemd as a package is more than just init. It is init, inetd, session manager (logind), udev, dns client, dhcp client, cron, su, and the list keep

Bundling. systemd as a package is more than just init. It is init, inetd, session manager (logind), udev, dns client, dhcp client, cron, su, and the list keeps growing. Basic thing is that first of all Poettering to it a toehold at Fedora (he works at Red Hat, so surprise surprise). Then he offered Gnome the code for supporting logind on a silver platter. End result is that to offer Gnome as the desktop you either have to patch it, shim it (ask Canonical how well that worked out) or adopt systemd. Effectively what is happening is that Fedora is becoming the de-facto standard for Linux. In part because it is effectively the testing distro for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus a large portion of userland devs (and a number of kernel devs) use it as their "dogfood".