The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Monolithic was perhaps the wrong word, swap it out for "intrusive" and parse again. My point is that, in many ways, the systemd project (of providing a core base system) is set up like the Linux kernel project. Which seems to have worked out pretty ok. Despite arguments by for instance A. Tannenbaum for a more minimal core and looser coupling of components, which seems like quite analogue.

The only major difference I can see in terms of "intrusiveness" is that the Linux kernel has always* been there and worked this way, whereas systemd is a change to how things were currently done in the base system plumbing.

* Since free operating systems became prevalent at least.