hope not tied to SystemD

Open source project maintainers in general.

And in particular, anyone attempting to replace the FHS 3.0, which I still try to follow as much as I can (with sane deviations, of course). Is it so much work to support those in a file-system hierarchy standard? I bet the differences are rather small.

> Do you think that "we" should still be actively supporting retrocomputing folks that intentionally run hardware that was discontinued at least two decades ago? What about Debain/KFreeBSD?

No. Hardware/software that was discontinued long ago is dead to me.

In general, maintaining support for those systems is a lot of work, and results in less safe code (for example, 32-bit code is prone to bugs). That's something I don't mess with.

> or Hurd? All of those users are hobbyists too!

I receive patches from GNU/Hurd maintainers when software that I co-maintain doesn't work in Hurd. I appreciate their effort in making it work, and accept those patches. After all, it's not too much; often, it's just a macro that in Hurd is not defined, so we define a fallback ourselves. Hurd is not discontinued, and not unsafe, so I help them.

> Given that systemd has been the default (or only) option for anything resembling mainstream released [2] or still supported [3] in the past decade, maybe that is where your attention should be focused instead of (more than) doubling your effort to support the remaining few percent.

Someone in this thread reminded that Gentoo doesn't use systemd by default. That's a system I would consider mainstream.

I personally use Devuan, and I'm happy with it. It works.