> Show me an alternative to systemd that matches its functionality and consistency. My issues with systemd do not pertain to functionality and consistency: rat

> Show me an alternative to systemd that matches its functionality and consistency. My issues with systemd do not pertain to functionality and consistency: rather, they are issues of taste, style, competence, design and size. The basic ideas behind systemd are, frankly, great. The free desktop really really needs something like it. 100% behind the idea and the functionality. The consistency is pretty good too, I think. It would be taste if it were less consistently in bad taste and more consistently in good taste. Which brings us to taste. First, systemd is security-important system software written in C. Why? There is no good reason to write software in C in 2019. Use a safer language like Go or Common Lisp (both of which are performant enough). I don't know if Java or other JVM languages would work. Perl probably would, although ensuring that a Perl project produces sane code is … difficult. Also on the issue of taste: systemd incorporates Windows-style .INI files wholesale into Unix-like systems. The freedesktop.org folks were already doing this, but why encourage it? The world has at least two better text-based alternatives to .INI files: S-expressions and YAML. Even JSON would be better, even without comments. Also on the issue of taste: systemd just doesn't feel like Unix. In order to get anything done one has to hand-edit lots of little files rather than run a few commands. It's a bit like if you had to run a text editor on a directory to add a file, rather than just creating the file. I'd love to see some commands like mktimer, mkservice or somesuch. I am mostly over the binary logfile issue — after all, ultimately everything on a computer is stored in binary — but I do wish that the tools were a little saner. It's still a pain to figure out where error outputs and so forth are going. The manner in which systemd takes over the world is completely inexcusable. I fully expect to see systemd-browser within the next decade, no doubt with just a few hooks to prevent using Firefox or Chromium, and of course with a few security issues just to spice things up. I really wish that someone with good taste had managed to get the attention of and money from Red Hat in order to design a clean, intelligent, 21st-century init system.