Comment by modo_mario 5 days ago
I'm not too big in this field but didn't many of those same IOT companies and the like struggle with the packages becoming dependent on Poeterings work since they often needed much smaller/minimal distros?
I work on embedded devices, fairly powerful ones to be fair, and I think systemd is really great, useful software. There's a ton of stuff I can do quite easily with systemd that would take a ton of effort to do reliably with sysvinit.
It's definitely pretty opinionated, and I frequently have to explain to people why "After=" doesn't mean "Wants=", but the result is way more robust than any alternative I'm familiar with.
If you're on a system so constrained that running systemd is a burden, you are probably already using something like buildroot/yocto and have a high degree of control about what init system you use.
I don't think this is generally true. If you are running Linux in your stack, your device probably is investing in 1GiB+ RAM and 2GiB+ of flash storage. systemd et al are not a problem at that point. Running a UI will end up being considerably more costly.