&gt; Linux has always been about choice<p>This is wrong. Linux has never been <i>about</i> anything. It&#x27;s always been only what people have made it; no less, no more.<p>Viewed like this, systemd is not at all &quot;un-linuxy&quot; (if that made sense in the first place). It is a set of tools written by a bunch of people to solve their problems, and has gained mindshare, users and developers faster than other alternatives, which is <i>exactly</i> what Linux (the kernel) did.<p>Your only choice is to use it, or not use it, but you don&#x27;t get to complain if someone else decides to depend on it because they deem superior to alternatives. If you want to keep other software from depending on systemd, the onus is on <i>you</i> to provide a reasonable alternative. It will not work to simply demand that others must spend their effort maintaining code that they have no interest in because <i>you</i> want something.