As for Linux from Scratch - This is something that's been on my radar, but without the part I'm truly interested in (learning more about SysV) then I'm less inclined to bother. I don't buy the reason of Gnome/KDE - isn't LfS all about the basics of the distro than building a fully fledged system? If it's the foundation for the other courses, but it still feels weak that it's so guided by a future GUI requirement for systemd when it's talking about building web servers and the like in a 500Mb or less as the motivation.
All the compliants I see tend to be philisophical criticism of systemd being "not unixy" or "monolithic".
But there's a reason it's being adopted: it does it's job well. It's a pleasure being able to manage timers, socket activations, sandboxing, and resource slices, all of which suck to configure on script based init systems.
People complain in website comment sections how "bloated" systemd is, while typing into reddit webpage that loads megabytes of JS crap.
Meanwhile a default systemd build with libraries is about 1.8MB. That's peanuts.
Systemd is leaps and bounds in front of other init systems, with robust tooling and documentation, and despite misconceptions it actually quite modular, with almost all features gated with options. It gives a consistent interface for linux across distributions, and provides a familar predictible tools for administators.
My problem with systemd is that it's taking over more and more and locking in. It is encouraging developers to have a hard dependency on it, and making it harder to have an alternative.
My problem is not philosophical with "it's a monolith, it's not unixy". My problem is "it's on the way to lock me in".
We like to complain about lock-in across the board. I don't see why it would be different with systemd.
For example, I never liked the idea of having my programs to manually daemonize, manage logs, set up permissions and all that boring, but security-critical stuff. And with systemd, I don't have to! Program reads from stdin/stdout, maybe gets socket from socket activation, and systemd does the rest.
Is it lock-in? Only because other system suck. Like, seriously, what stopped xinetd from having rudimentary volatile "on/off" control, so I could disable misbehaving service? Or why is start-stop-daemon so _stupid_, discarding all startup error messages? And don't get me started on all the different init file dialects for each system.
Maybe if the sysvinit programmers actually cared about providing nicer services to app developers, we would never end up with systemd.
If yes, that's yet another init system not made for application writers.
Come on man. It's been done for decades.
It doesn't take a giant bloated infrastructure to manage most people's needs, which are quite basic in most cases.
Turns out, a lot of people are not happy with "Come on man. It's been done for decades." attitude, and they wanted something new and much better. And so when something new came up, they jumped on it with both feet.
It's instructive to read Debian CTTE discussion on init systems (btw I think it's best tech drama of 2013, highly recommend) - a lot of people dismissed the sysvinit early on because it had no features (example [0]), which means the choices were either upstart and systemd. And between two of those, systemd is a clear win.
Read the thread and look at how many highly technical people with no relation to Fedora or Poettering is ready to choose _anything else_ just to get away from "it's been done for decades".
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2013/12/msg00234.html