I played around with upstart, it worked fine. Alternative init systems are a very old idea implemented over and over for decades. The "innovation" of systemd

I played around with upstart, it worked fine. Alternative init systems are a very old idea implemented over and over for decades. The "innovation" of systemd is product tying it deeply to Gnome. Nobody is willing to kick out Gnome, so they can make everyone else do whatever they want. Including, say, making it impossible to run any other init system. By analogy it would be like product tying emacs into python, such that you can't install or run vi if you have python installed at the upstream level, because the default location for python temp files is now /usr/bin/vi. Well, I guess you could stop shipping python, or cave in and remove vi. This is the "innovation" that is new in systemd. Merely being an advanced init is really old stuff.