systemd (with the constellation of its assorted tooling like udev, logind etc.) is the only system that correctly models stuff that happens around kernel (like

systemd (with the constellation of its assorted tooling like udev, logind etc.) is the only system that correctly models stuff that happens around kernel (like hotplugging stuff, on top of starting services). It's a compelling choice for general-purpose distros (those that span both servers and desktop), who don't want to maintain more stuff than they absolutely must (like two different init systems), and almost inescapable for today's DE's. Unfortunately that's about the only good thing that can be said about it. The community is perceived as toxic, because of the way it was adopted (by vote, not by consensus, i.e. pushed down the throats over the reasonable objections of large body of developers) (though it's false: it's not toxic at all, if you just approach them from outside with well founded feature request, they'll be far more accomodating than many FOSS projects). Conduct of lead developers was criticised (cf. kdbus). The stability and code quality has much improved, but at the time of discussion it was questioned. Last but not least, it comes with it's own load of complexity: you need to learn new concepts (e.g. something called "job") that are simply not there in inittab-derived systems like openrc, so it comes across as "undebuggable" if you're before the learning curve.