hi guys,

i know what initialization systems are, and pretty much what they do.
lately everybody has been giving out about various distros changing to systemd...

firstly have i got this right?

init is pretty much retired and used on many older distros

debian used init then switched to upstart and now uses systemd...though you can keep using upstart but its difficult to get right.

slackware uses a hybrid type sysv with bsd like scripting...

centos 7 is using systemd by default

so what is the big fuss? why would a poor init system steer people away from a distro they have used for years.

can it really be this important? i mean how many times a day are you going to reconfigure start-up services etc...i dont understand this.

Init systems are quite important for those that have to manage servers, typically sysadmins.

The location or function of init scripts is not why there's so much noise surrounding the adoptation of systemd. Calling systemd an "init system" is at best misleading, because it does an awful lot more than init ever did, and is continually absorbing and attempting to deprecate various system components that have little or nothing to do with the init process.

For instance, neither hotplug/udev nor syslogd have ever been part of init, but systemd has incorporated the former and is attempting to replace the latter. This has obvious implications for anyone depending on the functionality of those subsystems.

for HOME systems systemd is great ( but TAKES TIME to get used to using )

for a hp blade ???? ( yes AND no)

a server is not going to have all kinds of odd hardware plugged into it

hopefully the hardware on a server will NEVER change ( at least not for a long time)

int scripts are perfect for that

but not on HOME systems where who knows what will be plugged in and the hardware WILL change

i decided to test fedora 21 && 22 just becouse of systemd, i wanted to "know" what its like.

conclusion sofar: its ok for desktop.

The fuss is all because, some want flexibility and adaptability in a system. And init is one such.

Just another pid - just happens to be 1.
Or 0 occasionally...

Not quite. It's the PID belonging to the only process that could cause an entire system to crash, so that process must be 100% stable and virtually bug-free.

The problem that some people have with systemd is not its init part, it is the additions to it. While systemd started out as an init system it now is a system of building blocks for a complete Linux OS, it provides, besides the init part, services for logging, network setup, bootloading, session management, time/timezone settings, ..., basically anything that is needed to build a basic OS to build up from.
I will not go any further with that, if you want to have more information why people are opposed to systemd just go ahead and read one of the systemd threads on this forum, but be aware that you will see a lot of FUD, so better fact check extensively.

Thanks for all the reviews...busy watching a video on systemd on youtube...interesting...its 50 min long.

if you want to know what an init does, read the Slackware rc.S and rc.M in /etc/rc.d/
(in that order, /etc/inittab and "man inittab" explain why)
watching a presentation about systemd wont teach you anything about how a system initializes

What a coincidence - have a read of bin-bash-as-primary-init
Even got X running ...