What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014?

An anonymous reader writes With 23% of the year remaining, Linux Voice has donned flameproof clothing to subjectively examine what it feels have been the best distros of the year so far, including choices for beginners, desktop fashionistas and performance fetishists, before revealing a surprising overall winner.

Comments

Slackware

[ArchieBunker]

Minimal install footprint meaning no bloat. Install only what you choose plus no systemd bullshit.

Re:Slackware

[uvajed_ekil]

While Slackware has stood the test of time as a distro favored by many developers and admins, it is still not exactly "user friendly" for the average person. It is the first distro I ever installed, so it holds a place in my heart. However, I've tried it a few more times over the years and it has not been the best fit for my non-guru abilities.

Re:Slackware

[Orgasmatron]

You are doing it wrong. Slackware isn't for gurus, it makes them.

Re:Slackware

[geminidomino]

And Debian is for when those gurus get tired of manually maintaining hundreds of boxes.

This is literally the *only* reason we use Debian or derivatives for work. We're just too small to have that kind of time, which is depressing. Especially with this SystemD crap... One of these days soon, when my Copious Free Time makes another appearance, I need to re-evaluate FreeBSD. Hopefully, the upgrade process has improved since "make buildworld." :) Otherwise, I dunno what we're going to do...

Re:Slackware

[Spacelord]

Minimal footprint? The recommended installation method of Slackware is still to install "everything". From the installation guide:

If this is your first time installing Slackware, the "full" method is highly recommended. Even if this isn't your first time, you'll probably want to use it anyway.

This gives you a much bigger footprint than what Mint, Ubuntu or Arch give you by default.

Mind you, I love Slackware for its straightforwardness and simplicity in configuration, but footprint is not really a reason to recommend it.

Finally, I don't think that footprint matters a lot these days. What do I care if my distro takes up 5GB or 10GB... Sure I may not need all of the packages that are installed, but the convenience of having most commonly used libraries and programs at hand and not having to track things down as-needed is worth more to me than a few measly gigs of disk space.

Mint

[uvajed_ekil]

Mint has become the leader for home/desktop users. The Ubuntu base lends stability compatibility, while the more complete out-of-the-box experience and homegrown tools Mint offers make it a no-brainer (although I personally use Mint's Debian-based distro). For enterprise use I'd probably stick with RHEL, and perhaps CentOS for in between needs, but Mint just works so well that it has become a truly viable Windows replacement for many tinkerers and average, average people, and those who prefer not to support MS for whatever reason.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the pleasure of working with Mint for the first time today, actually. It was a strange experience; I'd been tasked with resurrecting an iBook G4 and needed to find a usable OS for it. I knew there were PowerPC versions of Linux, but the question was, which one? Once I learned that Ubuntu had a compatible version available I decided to check it out, which set off a long and difficult slog of troubleshooting and inexplicable flakiness. I expected this going in, of course, given what I was working with, but even after I managed to resolve the major issues (the OS outright not loading because of a firmware issue, no wireless connectivity at first, video problems, no sound, the whole nine yards) I thought it performed poorly. I figured maybe Ubuntu had simply outgrown computers of that generation, or something.

Whatever. My next candidate was Mint. A coworker of mine had already tried but failed to get Mint working on the iBook already, but I suspected there was a problem with the discs he'd tried to use. (His Ubuntu disc didn't work either, while the one I burned did.) I wasn't sure what other issues he had, something about the kernel not installing and the system not booting right afterward. I figured it was worth another shot, and whaddaya know, on the very first try my disc worked. Mint installed without a single catch and immediately ran wonderfully; the computer ran smoother, didn't chug as much while opening programs or windows, it really felt like a new machine. There are still some firmware issues to iron out but fixes for the iBook G4 aren't uncharted territory (after all, researching them is how I got Ubuntu to work, and how I got sound working in Mint) so I'm certain that getting wireless and so forth working won't be too difficult.

Mint's look and feel closely matches Windows, so it's easy to get used to. The programs that come with it are nice, too. If it can get a computer like that to run not just passably well but actually run good, and ready to perform useful work within fifteen minutes, I imagine the user experience on more modern i386 machines is even better. If I retire Windows from any of my current computers I intend to replace it with Mint first unless something better comes along.

Re:Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know anyone who actually uses it

As for myself and most other Mint users I know, it's pissed off ex-Ubuntu users who felt unheard by/shit-on by Ubuntu. I'm very happy with the change.

Re:Mint

[HJED]

heartbleed wasn't a bash exploit, and had nothing to do with the shell you used. The majority of linux distros had /bin/bash as their default shell.

Re:Mint

[DavidCBillen]

Until you want to do a distribution upgrade :(

Re:Mint

[hendrips]

I'll throw in my agreement with Mint for desktop users.

In my house, my wife is the Linux advocate, while I'm the one who's fond of Windows 7. This is in spite of the fact that I am usually the technically competent tinkerer, and she wants things to "just work." But my wife loves Linux because she never has to call me for help any more now that she got a new laptop and put Mint on it (that's not really a knock on Windows, it's just that her old laptop was a supremely crappy Vista machine that was always crashing).

My wife doesn't have a clue what ALSA or Pulseaudio are, she just knows that she can play all of her music through Amazon Cloud Player. She could care less about open vs. proprietary document formats; she just knows that she can do word processing without paying for Office, while still saving to files her friends & family can read. And she certainly doesn't care about the finer points of human-computer interface design; she's just happy that all of the icons and buttons are in the "right place," where she expects them after almost 20 years of using Windows. Most of all, she loves the fact that Mint never crashes.

Congratulations, Linux advocates. I never thought this day would come. But there's finally a distro out there that 1) can be installed and operated by a technically un-savvy but vaguely intelligent home user using only basic Google skills 2) requires minimal support from technically inclined friends/family 3) is rock stable 4) never, ever requires the use of the console 5) can perform all the basic functions an average home user would want (actual average users, not Slashdot's imaginary "average user") 6) and is still open-source, Unixy, and tinkerable.

Heck, I don't even use Linux, and I'll still say that I love Mint. Why are you Linux On The Desktop advocates not making a bigger deal about Mint?

I will note, however, that my wife flatly refuses to use the GIMP, both because of the weird interface and the awful name. It's the only thing that can make her switch back to her Windows partition. Can't someone come up with something better?

Re:Mint

[ArhcAngel]

For many other Mint users such as myself it's the inclusion of the non-free stuff that Ubuntu avoids due to licensing issues. I use my laptop to listen to music and watch videos. I can install everything I need on Ubuntu but it's a hassle and takes considerably more time than just installing Mint and running updates. I was installing Slackware and RH in 1994. Hell I've even built several Gentoo boxes over the years. As others have eluded I have grown weary of starting from scratch. Call me the anti-neckbeard if you will.

Re:FreeBSD

[uvajed_ekil]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Would this not be better asked as a poll?

[hermitdev]

Enough said in the subject.

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Gentoo....... As a software developer the ability to freeze certain packages without giving up critical updates is a game changer! Nobody else seems to let me do this without some binary C/C++ incompatibility. For that I love Gentoo. I also do weird things like rebuild the linux kernel using my ICC enterprise license along with firefox/chromium/ffmpeg. ICC compared to GCC is just blazing fast. Nearly 360% speed increases in some areas. No other distro makes something that crazy as easy as Gentoo does. It's a real hackers delight. (not the new-age incorrect interpretation of hacker)

Runners up

2. Slackware
3. Debian

Re:Gentoo

[arth1]

My main server is Gentoo. I have a few others, with various OSes, but they all suffer from lack of long term support and upgrade options. My Gentoo system was installed in 2002, and now, 12 years later it still runs - with everything upgraded many times over, both hardware and software. Everything is up-to-date with patches too, and features I do not want for security or resource reasons are left out.
It's the only OS I know of where either of this is possible.

Re:Gentoo

[SlashdotOgre]

I have been using Gentoo for over a decade now across multiple systems (starting with an IBM Thinkpad T21 with a P3 800MHz) and completely disagree. I have ran unstable for that entire time and while there was occasional breakage, it was never so bad that I couldn't fix it myself within a day (and usually learn a ton in the process).

With modern multi core processors, compiling is hardly endless, and maintaining multiple systems using one build server is fairly trivial.

Don't get me wrong, Gentoo does require some dedication and a willingness to learn. However it's a great distribution that's fairly easy to maintain for years, and it provides endless flexibility.

Also it's one of the few distributions willing to put up a fight over systemd which is important to me as a believer in the Unix philosophy.

Re:Gentoo

[Bill_the_Engineer]

If he's like me he stopped going to slashdot for a while, forgot his UID/password, realized the email address that was assigned to that UID no longer exists, and found it much easier just to create a new UID.

Dislike Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Gentoo a little over a decade ago, and it was awesome for exposing me to how Linux worked.

Arch today reminds me of that. Problem is, I don't have the time or patience to sit around fixing my Linux machine and playing Mr. Package Manager like I did when I was 17. Now I need something that just works.

I tried Arch about a year ago and was quickly turned off: the ISO that I downloaded wouldn't boot. Turns out they were shipping a broken kernel that week. No big deal, just hunt down the flag I needed to pass to the kernel, got it booted and installed. Configured, usable, a week later, do some updates, breaks something minor. OK, I can fix that. Wash, rinse repeat. I gave up, went back to Ubuntu.

Arch does have great documentation and good forums. Both the documentation and the forms for Ubuntu are worse than useless.

Yeah, I know, Ubuntu is too popular to be cool. But it has the right mix of recent packages (I used CentOS 6 at work for a while and was frustrated by how old everything was; installing package foo requires bar-2.4, but CentOS ships with bar-1.9.8 with 18 dependencies on that particular bar, so if you want foo you're stuck playing Mr. Package Manager) and support (I only go for the LTS releases). If a package I need isn't in Ubuntu's repositories (or the one that is there is too old), it's a good bet that there's a legitimate Ubuntu builds provided by the author.

Anyone using Arch in production? What's your rationale? How do you keep it from breaking?

Re:Dislike Arch

[santax]

One could consider using pacman on Arch for just that task. Or yaourt if you wish. (package managing ;) ) I am using arch for about 3 years now. I wouldn't use it an a production server, it's too bleeding edge for that and there is no such thing as LTS on Arch. But it's awesome as a dev system and as a general state of the art desktop/laptop. I would not recommend it to first time linux users or people who are afraid to open up vim. To get the most out of it, takes quite some time in the configs. After install it's pretty much naked, while being considered a good thing to me, might not be a good thing for someone who wants to start typing on a new book. I think Arch takes a bit more from the user in many ways. The community is helpfull, after you have proven to do your own research. It resembles openbsd both in docs as mentality. Because the documentation indeed is awesome.

Re:Dislike Arch

[marsu_k]

I wouldn't use it an a production server, it's too bleeding edge for that and there is no such thing as LTS on Arch. But it's awesome as a dev system and as a general state of the art desktop/laptop.

Very much this. We use some quite rapidly-developing technologies like node.js at work - the production servers are obviously updated very conservatively (and don't run Arch), but as a developer I can check out the latest version pretty much immediately after it is released and see if the updates cause some issues, or if there are new features that would benefit us in the future. And as said, works very well as a desktop.

Also, I was pleasantly surprised a while back when this laptop had to be repaired for a while - I had an older laptop that I hadn't used / updated in over six months, and thought getting it up to date would cause a lot of pain (Arch had moved into systemd during that time - no, not getting into that debate here). All that was required in addition to a regular pacman -Syu was to alter my boot line a bit to use systemd.

Re:Dislike Arch

[wrook]

I use Arch for my day to day programming machine. I would not use it for an outward facing server mainly because it does work as well as some other distros for nailing yourself down to a known, stable set of versions. For a dev platform, though, it is fantastic. I've got bleeding edge everything (in fact, it is hard to stop it from being bleeding edge) and it is highly configurable.

The best thing about Arch is that most of the configuration for packages is not done by default. You have to do it yourself. While this is indeed a pain in the neck most of the time, it is awesome for keeping bloat away from your machine. The netbook I'm using to type this post on, does not have NetworkManager, Avahi, Pulse Audio, etc, etc, bt *does* have Gnome Shell on it. Try doing that on an Ubuntu machine... I use this box for hacking around on the train and for practicing programming, and despite being many years old it's absolutely fine. My main dev is also running Arch, manly because I get rolling updates and bleeding edge updates. Occasionally I have problems with stability, but nothing I can't deal with fairly quickly. It is much, much better than having the big bang upgrade every X months.

Same as it's been forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're serious and doing serious business, RHEL is the only acronym you will ever need.

If you believe you're serious, but happen to be poor, you've got CentOS.

If you're one of those neurotic Linux on the Desktop folks, Mint is where it's at.

If you're completely insane and are sexually aroused by compiler flags, you want Gentoo.

If you're a crochety old bastard who writes out config files via echo and redirection, Slackware is your drug of choice.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[xvan]

Some closed source hardware providers choose them as targets for their products.
yum is better than apt
Lots of time is put testing so you don't get nasty surprises on production services that support millionaire businesses.
Long (really long) term support (and by support I mean security updates).

On the other hand, It's not a fair comparison, you should compare RHEL against Debian Stable.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[arth1]

RedHat is the group pushing SystemD. I'm not sure they're going to be great for business much longer.

RHEL 6 which doesn't have systemd will have support until 2017, and extended support until 2020. So they may not notice the full impact of pandering to Poettering until later.

I suspect that they think they'll get a large number of their customers to convert to using the cloud and no longer admin systems, so that it alienates admins doesn't matter.
I believe they are betting on the wrong whores.

Re:Same as it's been forever.

[Zugok]

If you're serious and doing serious business, RHEL is the only acronym you will ever need.

If you believe you're serious, but happen to be poor, you've got CentOS.

If you're one of those neurotic Linux on the Desktop folks, Mint is where it's at.

If you're completely insane and are sexually aroused by compiler flags, you want Gentoo.

If you're a crochety old bastard who writes out config files via echo and redirection, Slackware is your drug of choice.

Kinda reminds me of this post http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...

Re:FreeBSD

[Sarusa]

This is it! The year of FreeBSD on the desktop!

Re:Arch

[uvajed_ekil]

"But what makes Arch our winner is this: for the large part, its information applies to other distros."
That is very funny of them to say, since I'm not sure how that makes Arch itself a "better" distro than the competition (and since Ubuntu and Debian help apply to many many distros) though something to remember when you get tired of Arch and switch to Ubuntu or Mint. That said, the Mint forums have been an excellent resource for me. If I have a problem or can't figure something out, I first Google it, then Google it with "Ubuntu" as a search term, then if necessary I can ask a question in the Mint forums and generally have it answered within 24 hours. I have precisely zero intention of switching to Arch, but maybe I'll try their wikis and docs next time I have a problem.

Re:Arch

[santax]

Being a former dev and pro for SuSE, going to Debian for years and since 3 years switched to Arch I have to say, there is no documentation better in linux land than the one you can find at the Arch Wiki. It really is an example of how great docs should be. Nothing wrong with mint, ubuntu, slack, redhat and by all means, pick one that you like. I would not have picked arch as the best, since it's geared towards to technical crowd that knows where and how to fix things, but they are right when they say that the Arch documentation stands out alone. Openbsd's might just be better. Might.

Re:systemd

[gweihir]

Only from people with a clue about UNIX technology. Even among Linux users, that is a minority. I will not touch Arch with a 10 feet pole due to systemd. And no, I do not hate systemd, I just think it is a far substandard product. What I hate is that it is being made very difficult to avoid in a culture that prides itself on "choice".

Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[perpenso]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Which isn't really much of a problem. Many, if not most, Linux users just want Unix functionality and don't care about the Linux brand itself, don't care about the GPL and its politics, etc. Hence the popularity of Mac OS X for many *nix users. It just so happens that for commodity PC hardware Linux is one of the more convenient *nix offerings.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[7-Vodka]

FreeBSD is not Linux though.

Which isn't really much of a problem. Many, if not most, Linux users just want Unix functionality and don't care about the Linux brand itself, don't care about the GPL and its politics, etc. Hence the popularity of Mac OS X for many *nix users. It just so happens that for commodity PC hardware Linux is one of the more convenient *nix offerings.

Speak for yourself. I don't buy your claims to be able to speak for others.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[TyFoN]

I run arch on all my workstations/laptops both at home and work. The servers at work run debian.

I've tried so many times to get freebsd on my computers, some it will work on, but far too often it will kernel panic on ACPI, smp, driver bug etc. Especially on recent computers.

Graphics/games is another thing.
Now the most recent have started to implement the proper kernel features for nvidia blob, but it's still not as good as the linux driver, and I can't run steam except via wine.

Linux just works, that's why I use it.

Re:Most Linux users just want Unix ...

[perpenso]

By politics of the GPL I am referring to things like GPL v BSD. I don't think many *nix users will ever care at that level.

Proprietary vs FOSS, that is something different, that may one day become an issue. But FOSS in general, not the GPL specifically.

Cyanogenmod

[the_humeister]

Linux distribution? I'd go with Cyanogenmod.

Debian

[Randle_Revar]

Debian

Re:Debian

[RightwingNutjob]

Debian 6. Before all the shiny shit infected Deb 7.

Re:systemd

[grcumb]

systemd is the wave of the future. Or at least something similar to systemd that they'll probably hate just as much.

I haven't seen this much hate since OOP started getting popular and old school devs were dragged into it kicking and screaming. But guess what, OOP was the wave of the future.

Considering where the OOP-For-Everything crowd got us, and how long it took us to recover from the fact that it was the hammer for every nail for far too long, considering that we're finally emerging into a sane world where OOP has its place, as one approach among many....

... I'd say you're right about systemd:

It's being touted as The One True Way. Its detractors are ridiculed as hidebound old neckbeards[*] who don't know any way of doing things but their own. Its adherents are clever, antisocial alphas whose faith in their own intelligence is far too complete, and who don't know the difference between an argument and a quarrel.

Yep, it is OOP vs The World all over again. Dog help us all.

--------
[*] Seriously: I will punch the first person who uses that term in my presence.

Qubes-OS.org

[hAckz0r]

If you are into system security then check this one out. Security by hardware isolation is very hard to crack. Even the NIC and its kernel drivers live in its own VM and protects your system via IOMMU.

Systemd distribution

[GodWasAnAlien]

The Systemd distribution (or GNU/Systemd/Linux as it is now called) deserves the Man of the Year award this year, because it has unified so many stand alone Unix style components into one unified quality program. By unifying everything into one program, we have eliminated redundant code, bugs, and rallied all of the Linux community behind the one user-space kernel. We can continue this trend of streamlining and eliminating waste, by merging in a compositor, a browser engine. We believe that molecularity will only allow the user to be confused with choices and that good incremental development is like making good stew. Throw everything in.

Re:Missing one key point

[msobkow]

The Ubuntu upgrade encountered DB/2's configuration and startup scripts in the /etc tree, didn't know what to do with them, had updated half the packages on the system, barfed, and left the system with a non-responsive command prompt. As half the packages were for one release and half for another, the system would no longer even boot. Without the ability to boot even into single user mode, it was clearly impossible to recover the system so I switched to Debian.

I don't know that Debian is immune to the problem, but I've heard far less people complain about failed Debian updates than Ubuntu updates.

Having software that was locally installed, built from source, or otherwise not part of the system software database should not cause an upgrade to crash. At worst it should warn you that there are unrecognized files present and that you'll have to update them manually.

This is the only time in 30+ years of working with computers that I've seen an update crash because it ran into something it didn't recognize. I guess that's "hats off" to Ubuntu for another first. :P

systemd

[Spacelord]

I like Arch and its minimalistic DIY philosophy, but that's despite the fact that it uses systemd, not because of it. As a matter of fact, if they got rid of systemd it would be close to my perfect distro.

At the end of the day, an init system only matters so much though. Once your system is booted, and your running your software, you don't see it anymore. The times that I did have to deal with systemd, it was a damn pain in the ass though.

Re: Which Religion is Best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux supports snake handling in userspace, if your system has serpentd support (if you see /proc/serpents yours probably does); but it does not "do snake handling on the side". Asshole.

Desktop use and DVD playback

[chrish]

Honest question that I haven't been able to find an answer to...

Is there a desktop Linux distro that will play DVDs "out of the box"? Specifically, you stick it in the drive and it starts playing.

I've got an olde Pentium 4 system that's currently running Windows 7, and I wanted to put Linux on it... the main use case for this machine is playing DVDs during workouts.

Re:FreeBSD

[MrNaz]

The main difference is that FreeBSD users know what Google is and how to use it.

My two cents...

[DoomSprinkles]

This is just my personal opinion and im not saying this is the correct answer. This is my answer... Best distro overall of 2014? Arch Linux. The distro's affinity for clean and clear scripts on top of the way you build your system never ceases to teach me new things all the time. Best distro for the new user of 2014? Mint. Clean and simple package management. Best distro for business servers of 2014? CentOS 7. It is very well polished, rock stable, and dead simple Windows Active Directory integration. I lub Linux =B

systemd

[DrYak]

It's being touted as The One True Way.

huh... no. It's just reported that it's a useful piece of code which actually solve lots of problems.
it's being adopted in lots of place because of this, even in distro that don't necessarily depend on Gnome.

Nobody is trying to force you to use it. You're free to use something else.
You'll just be missing about tons of features which are really useful and come for free with systemd.

But if you don't want it. Fine. Keep using your kludged together scripts. Or move to something else (openrc, the spiritual successor of sysvinit done in a modern way. Or anything else).

Simply accept the fact that systemd is useful enough that tons of distro are picking it up.

The problem is that, instead of just doing that (use something else), each time something is announced about the systemd project (not even necessarily the systemd daemon running as pid 1) there are tons of trolls comming and screaming "systemd cancer!" and not doing much.
Whereas the correct reaction would be just "meh.." and keep on using whatever they like. And perhaps, if they are unhappy that most of the distro are moving toward systemd, they should start a new spin of Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu based on some other alternative init system.

But no, all you here is only whining and very few actual work (like systembsd or uselessd, or adapting launchd so it can serve as systemd replacement, etc)

Then don't

[DrYak]

Systemd gives me nothing I need. So tell me again why I need it or should want it.

Then don't. Stick instead to whatever pleases you. It's not a problem per se.

But accept that lots of other people DO find systemd useful enough to be worth the switching.
Including distros that aren't entire organised around Gnome.

If you don't like this situation, either move to a distro like Gentoo where that is still an option.
Or gather enough people and create your own spin of Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu (whichever is your preferred starting point) but organised around your preferred init system (with blackjack! and hookers!)

The problem is that, instead of doing this, most of the time, you only hear trolls spouting "Systemd is cancer!" and not doing much.

NixOS

[Warbothong]

Whenever I tried other distros, I'd always go back to Debian in the end, since its package management seems a lot saner than most.

NixOS is refreshing, since it package/configuration management seems to be an improvement over Debian's. It's still a little rough around the edges, but perfectly usable (as long as it loads emacs, conkeror and xmonad, it's usable)

Systemd uses

[DrYak]

Few random exemple where systemd helps:

- if you look at it probably 99% of all service on linux are just about starting an executable, with a few parameters.
-- with systemd, you do exactly that: write a service file that gives the name of the executable to run. and that's it. done. much more easy to maintain
-- with sysvinit, each distro has it's own local variant of boiler code that need to be copy-pasted around, and each service needs a whole script in /etc/init.d.
Whole script with duplicated lines vs simple text file.

- become a daemon requires some work.
-- either the developper must do a whole dance inside the code (double fork, sanitizing environment like closing descriptors, etc.)
-- or you need to take care of it from the outside (startproc, etc.)
systemd (like also daemontools and several other such "successors of sysvinit") can automatically take care of that. just run the soft in immediate mode, systemd takes care of the daemonisation/sanitization. In fact you can easily run as a service things like scripts.
So you want to have a daemon that is basically just a gawk 1 liner ? feel free.

automatic handling of modern kernel features. Cgroups, brokering capabilities, etc. Classical sysvinit has no concept of these (of course, they didn't exist back then).
- You would need either more kludge in you init.d scripts
- or use a modern system that can take care of that. systemd is one of them.

very light-weight container creation: other parts of systemd take care of state-less systems (basically you only need /usr for a system to work, /etc and /var can be automatically rebuilt with default settings from /usr if they are empty), various daemons under the systemd project can take care of the basic initialisation step (you don't need a full fledged dhcp server and client/pair compatible with every possible corner situation and supporting every option under the sun when all you need is just quickly hand out an IP to a LXC container - similarily to how one would use dnsmasq, systemd has its own micro dhcp implementation).
that makes possible to use LXC-style container (and thus much higher level of isolation) for anything that you don't trust and would like to run in its own container.
You don't trust skype, specially since microsoft did take it over? LXC container combined with SELinux and AppArmor (which LXC supports) would be a way to isolate it. Systemd (not the pid1 daemon, the whole project) is a project that can help generating such containers on the fly without any administrative intervention nor any configuration required.

You might not need these. And you're free to stick to old sysvinit if you want. Or at least move to a more modern spiritual successor of this (openrc)
(Gentoo give you choice of system. Or you could gather people and start "Rubuntu, an openRC spin of Ubuntu")

Or you might want these features. And systemd is then a nice single stop for all this plus more. (Though you could find similar daemon giving similar functions spread over 20 different projects).

It's a bit like the situation with TeX (nice single stop to get a ton of filters for text processing and typesetting) Ghostscript (printing) Pnmtools or ImageMagick (single suite of tighly integrated image filters/processing), etc.
Systemd is a similar suite containing all the necessary building blocks for taking care of system initialisation/process starting, etc.

Systemd has tons of useful funtionality, and thus lots of distribution decided to pick that one up as an openrc successor.
(Including distributions not depending on gnome)

Re:systemd

[RavenLrD20k]

Tool for the job. OOP has its place in programming as does procedural. The same can be said of systemd. My desktop system I'm probably not going to care when the upgrade forces me into systemd since it's not a system that I need to be concerned about long term uptime and stability. My servers on the other hand, they're a completely different story. I've got another year or so on my LTS, and in that time I intend on putting systemd through its paces on a test machine to force it to fail, and then observe the ways in which it fails. If it does what my hypothesis says it will, based on its generally monolithic design strategy, then I will be looking for a distribution that hasn't drunk the systemd Kool-Aid for my next LTS. If it surprises me and performs well during the fail testing, then I will consider using it.

I believe that this is where the core hatred for systemd is really coming from. It's not so much that it's a bad init system or that people are resistant to change, though the latter is certainly a factor with good reason. It's the fact that Distributions are forcing this change on System Administrators and removing the choice for the Sysadmins to continue with a technology that they have working and have learned the core of how it works or have to install and learn a whole new system that they may not know their way around yet. Has RH or Debian offered the old System V init package as an alternative on their default install? Not that I've seen. This is where the ire is coming from. The defense for systemd is "if you don't like it, it's open source; change it in the source." The people that say this don't realize that in a corporate production environment, this is rarely a feasible argument. Sysadmins are not usually programmers, and these operating system distributions -- Redhat, CentOS, Debian, etc -- have just sold them out and made more work for them to test the ways systemd can fail on their systems and reanalyze their disaster recovery plans to account for this new anomaly. Or management may just decide that they need to go get a service contract with Microsoft for their needs and dump Linux altogether as they may deem the MS option as cheaper and easier to maintain long term.

Fast blanket changes to new technologies by the distributions without accounting for the slower moving but gigantic enterprise user base without offering the option to keep their current technologies was probably one of the dumbest moves they could have done. Why did most Enterprise that use windows software keep on XP until Windows 7 came out, skipping Vista? Why am I using a windows 7 desktop at my employer right now when Windows 8.1 is out there and mature enough for the next phase of OS to have been announced? For the same reason you're not going to get Enterprise customers jumping on board with the next release of the Linux OS they're using...if they're using one of those that is dropping System V.

Re:FreeBSD

[nullchar]

Has freebsd been the best Linux distro of 2014?

By the end of 2014 it will be, thanks to systemd.

Re:FreeBSD

[nullchar]

Gentoo seemed to figure out init script dependency.

I'm open to changing init scripts, but do we have to change everything else too? Like binary logging and needing an interface to access those logs instead of just tailing/grepping them. (Though I think systemd does support duplicate logging to certain syslogs.)