&gt; Those &quot;separate applications&quot; are still tightly coupled to the main, and therefore they share the complexity&#x2F;attack surface concerns.<p>They have no access to systemd-init, only to an API presented by it (as does every other application if they so choose to use it), and thus this statement is incorrect. A bug in one of those applications cannot magically get access to systemd-init (which I&#x27;m assuming is what you meant by &quot;main&quot; here).<p>&gt; If your system gets pwned, does it matter to the user if it was via the &quot;systemd&quot; binary itself or by one of the official &quot;systemd-somethingd&quot; binaries (that have no other purpose other than interoperation with the main app, developed by the same people) that come with every OS using it? Had the distro maintainers not shoveled an extra ~670,000LoC down their throat, they wouldn&#x27;t have been pwned.<p>It absolutely matters! A bug in systemd-init can do much more damage than a bug in timesyncd could. Also, I really don&#x27;t care about your anger towards an open source project, please refrain from expressing it to me if you&#x27;d like to continue this conversation.<p>&gt; If systemd wants to replace my freaking cron, DNS, ntp, and logging daemons, and the majority of in-production deployments use the application like that, I will be evaluating the application&#x27;s complexity against how it&#x27;s used in the real world.<p>You may want to create a separate post somewhere which compares the SLOC of all the applications systemd attempts to re-create (choosing perhaps the most popular from each) along with the complete systemd package, but I personally wouldn&#x27;t have any interest in it since it would be a factually correct comparison.<p>&gt; sysvinit doesn&#x27;t attempt to replace resolvconf, ntpd, crond, and syslog-ng. systemd does.<p>That&#x27;s exactly right, but systemd-init doesn&#x27;t attempt to replace those either (besides syslog-ng (journald), which I already mentioned as being fair to include with the SLOC count)*.