You're totally right about the false dichotomy, but I don't see why you think other init system were ignored. Debian used a really open process to decide the n

You're totally right about the false dichotomy, but I don't see why you think other init system were ignored. Debian used a really open process to decide the new default init system where every developer could propose any init system provided that someone offered to maintain it. Since SysVinit, systemd and Upstart where the only ones with a credible maintainership (OpenRC didn't work on Debian until a few week after the discussion started) the discussion was centered on those three. So it's not like other init system were ignored, it's just that noone bothered to do the actual work to make them suitable replacements. My hypothesis is that systemd was the first to provide enough benefits to motivate people to implement the switch in Debian. From a distribution maintainer the fact that systemd tackles many loosely related problems is an actual benefit, since now said maintainer just need to coordinate with an upstream project instead of having to maintain dozens of special snowflake systems (eg. to set the hostname). This is what most systemd critics fail to accept. Oh, and the shell is nice but it's one of the worst languages to implement anything non-trivial, http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html is enough for me welcome the idea of getting rid of it in the boot process. :)