We're moving more and more to having unified low-level services across Unices, so it stops being about stupid things like "Oh sorry, Arch can't run this because it uses its own audio stack even if we're just using audio to make a notification sound", and starts being about the things that are fundamentally different about the systems.
Think about how nice it is that we don't have to recompile most things for most kernel versions. Why do we have to set up multiple startup script mechanisms?
> Think about how nice it is that we don't have to recompile most things for most kernel versions.
Yes, nobody has ever had to recompile their application to work on a new kernel. If you mean that's nice that there's binary backwards compatibility, I agree. I don't see what this has to do with supporting multiple systems.
> Why do we have to set up multiple startup script mechanisms?
Why do we have to support multiple <insert any kind of software> ?
> We're moving more and more to having unified low-level services across Unices
AFAIK, the only thing I know of moving toward middleware unification specifically is Linux desktop software. Choosing to use systemd in exclusion of everything else is "unification" in the same way that nationalism/xenophobia/homophobia are. (i'm aware of how mean that sounds, but it's the closest comparison I can think of)
It is certainly nice that there is now middleware that abstracts the underlying software that controls the hardware, for example, or that authentication and authorization are more uncoupled. But this is really almost the opposite of what systemd does.
We're moving more and more to having unified low-level services across Unices, so it stops being about stupid things like "Oh sorry, Arch can't run this because it uses its own audio stack even if we're just using audio to make a notification sound", and starts being about the things that are fundamentally different about the systems.
Think about how nice it is that we don't have to recompile most things for most kernel versions. Why do we have to set up multiple startup script mechanisms?