Some unreliable predictions for 2015

Debian or Debian based distribution and or distribution in general that ship and thus "support" more than one init system will ship two components or two sub component depended on said init system.

In Fedora FESCo/FPC in it's infinite wisdom allowed for sysv initscripts being shipped in a separated sub component after unit migration even thou it made no sense and had no practical purpose.

If I can recall correctly maintainers of about 30 components decided to take advantage of that thus supporting both systemd units and the legacy sysv or upstart ( no distro migrated to native upstart configuration file otherwise everybody would have been done arguing since it would have been the same amount of transition pain ) but none of the maintainers of components that make up the core/baseOS and depend on an init system did , hence even if you wanted to use those components on a systemd free system you could not since you could not boot one ;)

I assume other distro went through same/similar "migration" process but in the case of Debian or Debian based distros or simply distro that are supporting more than one init system, the maintainership burden will be multiplied by the number of supported init system as well as bug reports and the user frustration that goes hand in hand with that when things dont work as expected ( things work fine on init system x but not y, the component only ships init system configuration file for init system x not y etc ).

And I dont think the fight for Debian with the freedom to choose the init system will be ongoing but rather the community will simple refer those that want that to that self proclaimed VUA crowd and the fork they based on Debian.

Implicit in this prediction appears to be the assumption that "systemd will win", and sysv, upstart, and even those Linux distributions using a bsd-style init will all move to systemd.

NOTHING in Unix or Linux has been like this - ever. Both emacs and vi are still with us, decades later. We still have sendmail, postfix, courier, exim, etc. We still have DJB versions of various programs, along with the non-DJB versions. About the closest thing we have to a monoculture is XOrg, but that wasn't by Xorg trying to stamp out SVGALIB, and even now XOrg isn't trying to stamp out Mir or Wayland.

I would like to see the systemd wars die down, too. I would just like to see it die down with several distributions using it, several distributions using other init systems, and just have the flaming stop.

This so-called "settling down" in the ongoing systemd war is a misconception stemming from the end-of-year holidays around the world, and this narrative is being pushed by journalists with financial ties to Red Hat. Unsurprisingly, examples of the latter will go out of their way to present systemd's brave new world as a foregone conclusion. According to this narrative we're to accept that everything pre-systemd will now break, and that the only way to fix it is to lube up and bend over; or become a ridiculous dinosaur for life.

In the mean time, power management in Debian testing and unstable continues to remain broken unless systemd or systemd-equivalent components are installed. Relatedly cryptsetup will still interact incorrectly with sysvinit boot scripts and the boot console, preventing it from setting up encrypted block devices at boot even when the correct passphrase is given. Since power management no longer detects that the computer is attached to a power supply, anacron only runs its jobs at fresh reboot and only if that is done while leashed; this keeps automatic backups from happening as specified.

The situation where power management failure prevents automatic suspend and automatic switch to "lose at most 30 seconds' work instead of 60 minutes" in low-battery conditions is a recipe for catastrophic data loss. The failing of regular automated backups aggravates such a catastrophe to outright disaster by preventing recovery from any backup besides those that were created manually, or pre-date Debian's systemd madness.

The constellation of outright egregious systemd breakage persists, so the war is not over. However, as in any war, propagandists will sacrifice truth and journalistic integrity for an appearance of pious conformity as their patrons require.