Kevin Boone:
I’ve found that many systemd components are less effective in an embedded environment than the traditional alternatives. I’ve shown some illustrative examples in this article, but I really don’t think there’s much controversy here: this simply isn’t the environment that systemd was designed for. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to find a mainstream Linux distribution that doesn’t use systemd – even Raspberry Pi distributions use it.
As systemd absorbs more functionality into itself, there’s going to be little motivation to maintain alternatives. After all, if everybody uses systemd, what motivation is there to support anything else? My concern is that we’re moving towards a future where Linux is inconceivable without systemd. That will be a problem for those environments where systemd really doesn’t shine.
Dinit feels like it could be a good option:
Dinit fits in the middle ground between extremely simple supervision suites and the more complex service managers.
It’s the init system used on Chimera Linux, which I’m running on a number of systems, including the WSL2 install that I’m writing this post on. Dinit has been great in my experience, although that’s admittedly also on desktop and server machines. It’s a lot smaller in scope than systemd so it would allow embedded systems to continue to use tools like Chrony and syslog-lite mentioned in the post.