It&#x27;s important to realize that &quot;a replacement for systemd&quot; is neither achievable nor desirable.<p>systemd has grown fast and conquered large market shares because it was backed up by a company, which put a lot of money and manpower into it - to write it, to integrate it, to advertise it. The only thing that has not been correctly funded in systemd is research and design.<p>systemd is only Open Source if you read the license; all its other aspects are proprietary - it&#x27;s software made by a company and aiming to capture a market. It is impossible to compete with systemd on the same grounds, because no real Open Source developers will have as many resources as Red Hat.<p>And even if it was possible, the result of such an attempt would simply be another integrated behemoth, powered by money and marketing instead of good technical decisions. (Or even worse, powered by ideology - can you imagine a systemd-like controlled by the FSF?) In the end, the situation for the users would be even worse than it is today. You don&#x27;t fight Goliath with Goliath; you don&#x27;t fight Microsoft&#x27;s hegemony by buying Apple products.<p>About interface compatibility: the author of the DnE article (vezzy-fnord) has written uselessd, and finally abandoned the project because the systemd interfaces are so tightly integrated with the systemd design in the first place that it&#x27;s impossible to be compatible without simply being a systemd clone, which he did not want uselessd to be. No, interface compatibility is not an option, because it would simply acknowledge the validity and superiority of the systemd architecture, and nobody wants a copy of systemd.<p>I believe that the way to provide an alternative to systemd is to provide all the functionality that the systemd users like, but in a technically better, less integrated, more unixish way.<p>With s6, s6-linux-init and s6-rc, I now have respectively a process supervision system, a simple init process and a service manager, which should be sufficient for a majority of applications. The next important thing that sysadmins like in systemd seems to be cgroup management, so I&#x27;d like to study the thing soon and assess what needs to be done next; but for now, I believe that the s6 family of programs is now viable as a serious alternative to systemd, and I would love to give it a broader audience.