Well, I could be reasonably sure that it was, at least before I learned today that there were other init systems that also displayed their output like that. So,

Well, I could be reasonably sure that it was, at least before I learned today that there were other init systems that also displayed their output like that. So, the statement: > the green [ OK ], is what many people already identify systemd with is true for people like me that were not familiar with those other systems. For example, most probably use Ubuntu (and probably only Ubuntu), and as far as I know it didn't display those [ OK ] until after it adopted systemd. So, at least there's a very large portion of users that never saw those [ OK ] until systemd came along. If I remember right, it was the same case with Archlinux, which is where I was first exposed to systemd. Imagine, the biggest news in your distro is the migration to systemd and the first and most obvious change you notice is that the boot process has all these neat [ OK ]s instead of random text. I think it's to be expected that people would identify systemd with that.