If there's one thing I've learned about FOSS, it's that everyone is looking for an excuse to fork things. Linux will never develop a monoculture - because someone can and will fork it. How many distributions are there? desktop environments? Package managers? Text editors and IDEs? And even zooming out of linux, there's openBSD, freeBSD, etc; If you start yelling about monoculture, isn't sysv init the worst offender for that? We have less monocultures than ever before.

If you think freedom is the ability to run only the code you want, the only way you're ever going to get freedom is by writing everything from scratch. Software will never be exactly the way you want it to be unless you write it yourself.

Most software depends on other software. That's just how things work. GNOME is particularly bad offender for that - it installed apache for some reason last time I used it. But GNOME also does a lot of things I don't really need it to do. Maybe someone else uses those features, and that's OK. You can switch DE if you really don't like systemd that much. But if you don't, that's not denying you your freedom - you made a decision about the benefits and drawbacks of a product, and decided to use that product.

Nobody really says how systemd only took over for political reasons, there's just random posts on forums that make claims and link to some dude's podcast. There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious.

I think systemd is the wrong choice for debian/ubuntu. But there's no reason to badmouth people about it and say hurtful things. Just use something else.

> We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it.

Wow... we've come a long way baby! Now freely available software that you can modify as needed without interference is taking away your freedom! ;-)

> I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd.

Actually, the problem is that if you load IPv6 support after a socket was created, there's no efficient way to make that existing socket compatible with IPv6, which of course creates a nasty little integration problem. That wasn't a choice of the systemd folks, that was a choice of how the kernel folks organized their network subsystem & modules.

Systemd runs fine on my system with no IPv6 support.

> Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about.

For all the complaining about NIH syndrome and absorbing other projects for political purposes, systemd actually builds on top of a lot of very well established components (dbus, udev, etc.). To the extent that software gets tightly coupled with it, it wouldn't be hard to change it so that it used those standard components without systemd... unless systemd is actually providing some unique advantages for that software that you can't live without. In which case... go out and do a better job of it!

> I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.

I know, Unix is annoying that way. ;-)