In case you're bored enough to read my ramblings and/or interested in what I understood and how, then consider reading the spoiler below.
spoiler
Fam, you're all over the place.
Because you did an awful job at pointing at the supposed contradiction, I'll have to analyze your excuse of an elaboration so that it somehow starts to make sense if at all:
A contradiction consists of N statements that logically contradict with each other; for the sake of making it more precise we'll refer to these statements as P, Q, R, S etc. After we've established this, we can move on to find what these alleged statements are from your comments. My best take would be:
(Supposed) Contradicting Statements:
- P: systemd is the only init that's beyond a particular level of excellence and/or feature set.^[1]^
- Q: Some combinations of distro + DE are cumbersome and unwieldy at best if systemd is not used.^[2]^
Perhaps some other related statements that are either implied or a given/fact:
- R: Kicksecure uses systemd as its init.
- S: Modern distros use an init.
- T: Default init is chosen based on preference^[3]^.
- U: Kicksecure has to use systemd because P despite not being in favor of some aspects of its design.
Please feel free to notify me if I missed the mark!
Don't you think that P and Q are actually complementary to one other?
No, not at all.
The crux might be here. But I'm not sure where exactly you might have tripped over. Was it because I said "opponents" instead of "(some) opponents"? Was it because I said "out of necessity", while elsewhere I said "don’t allow any differentiation in init or make it very cumbersome and unwieldy at best", but in this case they aren't contradictory statements. Was it the fact that Devuan exists? But, this assumes that any of the inits found on Devuan are somehow as mature and feature-rich as systemd. Which, unfortunately, is simply not the case. (I'm hopeful that dinit and s6 might reach maturity soon, though.)
So trying to use Kicksecure without systemd would be very cumbersome and unwieldy at best.
Exactly, that was my point.
Perhaps Madaidan should’ve used Devuan as a starting point instead.
It's a team effort, I don't even know if he started working on Kicksecure from its inception^[4]^. They might also simply be victims of the sunk-cost fallacy. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if -to them- systemd's pros simply outweigh its cons. Which, curiously, gets us back to the entire point of my original comment; viable alternatives to systemd don't exist. This painful truth is not only sad and unfortunate, but perhaps even worrisome for the future of Linux.
- From: "systemd has become so good that even opponents can’t deny its merits and continue to make use of it for the time being out of necessity"
- From: "some combinations of distro + DE don’t allow any differentiation in init or make it very cumbersome and unwieldy at best."
- Preference is arguably too broad of a term, but I wanted to make clear that distro maintainers have different priorities.
- This page suggest otherwise, simply because someone else is referred to as founder. Though, ultimately, I don't know.
If not 😜; did I understand you correctly in that the mere existence of Devuan is the supposed contradiction?
Couple of questions: