The problem is, these parts sometimes are forced upon you, creating rugpulls. You update your system, and tada! something has changed without you even notice, and that might be something you have relied on for a decade or more.

Learning new things is not a problem, but now I have to adapt into that thing and it might not even perform the same, and a fallback might not be possible. Opening a great can of worms you didn't want in the most unpleasant time.

One of the problems with integrated solutions is how much glue code they contain to handle these interactions. KISS tools talk over sockets, via very simple protocols. i.e. they shout each other over mountains using well defined horns and the voices they use are distinct and simple. Less glue code, simpler codebases, more robust tools.

KISS, Everything is a File, Send conservatively but receive generously are three pillars of what makes *NIXen robust systems. If that interconnectedness and meshing of things were robust, we wouldn't have made Windows a laughing stock for its crashes and security problems.

Tell me, how can a WMF or cursor file can infiltrate a whole OS? How can not you print without installing half of the desktop or literally can't have a terminal only Windows Server system? Because everything is connected and they can't be separated anymore.

These "tools thrown together in a bucket in haphazard manner" have kept systems running for literal years between reboots because they talked over these simple sockets. Heck, many good Linux servers die not because of software, but hardware failure.

And I respect Linux because this is still true despite systemd today.

> At least I can be certain that the interactions between the components are known and tested.

Oh good _lord_ you absolutely cannot. It has been my professional experience that Systemd Project is fractally complex, most of that complexity is accidental, and approximately no one on the project is interested in investigating and fixing the intermittent-but-showstopping problems that arise from that accidental fractal complexity. [0]

Poettering and crew really built the project a fantastic escape hatch with their whole "Your usecase is legacy and we're not supporting it." attitude.

[0] The mess of tools in the Systemd Project work fine until they very suddenly do not, and then the best you can do is bodge a workaround because you're very unlikely to ever get a fix for your problem. The folks that staff the project simply don't have the attitude required to work on and maintain a ever-more-sprawling project that aims to be _the_ userspace thing atop which every Linux distribution is built. "That's hard to fix/do. I don't care that you've had a working system for 10+ years, I'm not fixing the thing that's broken for you." is an absolutely unacceptable attitude for folks involved with such a project to have. [1]

[1] If the project was a little take-it-or-leave-it side project, that attitude would be entirely acceptable... encouraged, even! But because of the position in which the project willingly and aggressively put itself into, it's not a little side project.