> Without competition, software rots and/or never gets better. [...] systemd since it was locked in as the only properly supported Debian/Ubuntu init To be fai

> Without competition, software rots and/or never gets better. [...] systemd since it was locked in as the only properly supported Debian/Ubuntu init To be fair, systemd was rotten to the core from day one (literally - namely, the core concept of shoving as much crap into pid 1 as possible to abuse the special semantics that are supposed to only allow for reaping of orphan processes), so you can't really blame that on lack of competition. Your overall point is spot on, though. (And I suppose you could blame lack of sufficiently direct/credible competition for Debian being able to shove systemd down everyone's throats, rather than being forced to support multiple init systems.)