>Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

https://cscie2x.dce.harvard.edu/hw/ch01s06.html

systemd seems to violate this at every turn, but sadly they are not the only ones to do that in Linux. I wonder at what point we should start considering Linux to be its own thing instead of "UN*X like".

I know people like to complain, but these comments are not really based in reality. systemd is really a suite of applications that work together to provide init, service management, network management, &c. there's no single giant program that does all this. each component has a specific focused task.

you could break this out into individually named projects, but nobody complains about coreutils enabling dozens of different workflows.

What about problems that are not "one thing" only? Like, should a web browser be 640 piped subprocess in a trenchcoat, would that really be maintainable/easier to see how it works?

Lot of this comes from kernel though, cgroups and processes have tons of knobs to tweak and systemd merely exposes those.