I've been reading about the systemd debates for months, as one of the sources of information on it is has been a Linux distro mailing list I'm on.
systemd is a suite of system management daemons, libraries, and utilities designed for Linux and programmed exclusively for the Linux API. Systemd authors characterize the software suite as a "basic building block" for an operating system.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemdSteven J. Vaughan-Nichols probably isn't an authoritative source on systemd, so he's probably wrong to say that systemd is not good. One way of looking at it is the people who are being extremely vocal about systemd being evil are just a segment of the overall Linux community. There's a larger portion of users and developers who are enjoying systemd and who aren't saying anything, although some of them have stepped up to the plate and defended systemd against the naysayers. The same debate happened when KDE4 came out, although in the end KDE4 won.
From what I know, systemd isn't liked by the anti-systemd people because they claim it breaks the Unix philosophy, whereas Unix systems are supposed to have one program that does one thing and does it well; in the case of systemd (according to its detractors), it's a monolithic swiss army knife that has taken over Linux like a piece of malware, as it's doing many things and running many daemons and services. The anti-systemd people claim that systemd has become its own operating system and many things (like Gnome 3) are becoming dependent on it, and that if people accept it now, the future isn't looking good. Another aspect the anti-systemd people bring up is that Lennart Poettering and Red Hat have a secret ploy to control the Linux kernel and other software running on top of it, and are gaining ground after having carried out their evil totalitarian plan to have their system be the predominant suite of software to control the system and services. Another complaint is that old shell scripts that worked with System V don't work with systemd, and that systemd uses binary log files instead of writing to log files in plain text.
How I look at this issue is this: whoever did the work gets the credit. UNIX System V had problems that were lingering for years that I don't know enough about to convey any information on, but it apparently was not in such a great state code-wise, and either needed to be completely replaced or practically rewritten. Since Pottering and Red Hat stepped up and put in the work, then credit is owed to them. A lot of the people complaining are feeling like this new system has essentially been foisted on them through surreptitious methods, therefore they feel somewhat helpless and at the mercy of Pottering and Red Hat. Pottering also has been accused of having a bad attitude towards people in the Linux community, and there are flame wars you can find online that got pretty popular involving some of the things he said. I've read that certain people feel like Pottering has a superior attitude, and since he's still fairly young, it probably makes some senior developers and I.T. administrators feel as if their opinion is being disrespected by a younger person. Personally, I think Pottering is probably a really good coder and could code circles around most developers.
In the end, almost all of the major distros have now switched over to systemd, including Debian, which is one of the more conservative distributions that has a long following and that I actually use myself for server purposes. I personally have no problem from a political sense with systemd because the code is all open source, and it's being backed by a huge Linux Company. Torvalds himself has also stated that he likes systemd. It's worth mention that I've never had any problems with systemd crashing or failing to boot the system -- not even once in years. An interesting thing to note is that Theodore Ts'o, the developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, has voiced concerns about systemd, and obviously somebody that writes filesystems knows a thing or two about writing code. I'm not on either side of the debate, but if systemd was so evil, it doesn't make much sense that nearly all the popular Linux distros have switched to it. I don't really like the new name for the Debian fork either; Devuan? How do you even pronounce that? Dev-oo-an or De-view-an? Dev-juan? By the way, don't believe everything you read on Slashdot. You never know who has more than one account and posts replies to themselves to make their opinion look like other people are agreeing with them.
