hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 29, 2025 8:59 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: hope not tied to SystemD by cypherpunks2
Parent article: Finding a successor to the FHS

That was my thought as well.

It's interesting that people don't seem to wonder why the number in the name should suddenly jump from 5 to 500 …

Also, the legacy init system which systemd replaced wasn't actually called “SystemV”. It didn't have a proper name to begin with (after all it was just the init system, not much to see here, move on) and, in the Linux community, people used to refer to it as “System V init” because it was patterned on what was delivered with Unix System V (in the 1980s), as opposed to, e.g., what BSD was doing. So it isn't entirely obvious why the successor to “System V init” would be called “SystemD” – if Lennart Poettering had intended to continue that pattern he would clearly have gone with “System D init” and not just “SystemD”, but then it'd still be strange to move from “V” to “D” and not “VI” or “W” (remember that the X Window System was the successor of another window system called W, hence the “X”).

Anyway, more than a decade and many blog posts, man pages, distribution releases, conference presentations, etc. later it should be common knowledge that the “d” at the end of “systemd” is, in fact, lowercase. It is reasonable to assume that people who still insist on writing “SystemD” have either been living under a rock or else have an axe to grind.