<i>Currently I am not aware of any serious effort besides the systemd project to provide a coherent, modern core userland for Linux distros.</i><p>There&#x27;s your problem. You don&#x27;t even have any defined scope. A &quot;coherent, modern core userland&quot; doesn&#x27;t actually mean anything concrete - it covers enormous ground that no single package can obey.<p>Modern service managers are plentiful - nosh, s6 and perp probably being the most promising.<p>The &quot;old sysvinit thing&quot; has been replaced many times for over 15 years by now. Just because you didn&#x27;t notice, well, that&#x27;s your problem.