systemd works best, scales well and causes less pain at maintaining

You sound new to the ecosystem at large, and I don't mean that to be condescending, just that you may not have all the context needed to understand why it exists. Any distro that exists right now can flip back to SysV if they want to. They just don't want to. It may be more flexible to the neckbeards, but it's massively more comprehensive in scaling and integrating than a set of Init scripts. It has huge benefits to system integrators, OEMs, and especially the people who manage the largest concentration of Linux deployments: Datacenter Ops teams.

The fact that you, a Desktop user takes issue with that is meaningless to the ecosystem at large. I manage thousands of deployed bare metal machines, and I'd never switch back, because it SysV was fucking painful. Sure it was easier to debug in some cases, but was it as useful or reliable? Not even close.

Just go use something else and stop letting it bother you. You'll feel better in the long run.

The only option limiter to ever exist in Linux is the amount of free time maintainers have and the effort they're willing to spend.

(This is a convoluted way to tell you that if you want more "anything" independence you should contribute)

It would seem my point is not getting through (ie. I must not have expressed it well enough).

You having freedom doesn't mean other people have a duty to support what you do - it just means they don't have legal ground to stop you.

For example, freedom of speech doesn't mean that newspaper must publish whatever you write - it just means the police won't come knocking on your door at 5am because you of something you wrote.

The "idea of linux" (by which I take you mean the idea of FOSS in general, not of the kernel specifically) isn't to support anything and everything.

Does dropping 32 bit go against the "idea of linux"? Does software being developed/tested only on specific distros go against it? Do devs that only supporting glibc because they don't care about musl go against the idea of linux?

I’m just expressing a concern where over relying on one init system will limit options

Nope, nothing actually limits the options of people who don't like systemd: if they want to run some FOSS piece of software whose upstream devs don't care about openrc (or whatever init of choice), they'll just have to fork the projects, put the work in, and the upstream devs won't be able to stop them in any way.

This is what the "freedom" in FOSS means. Twisting it to mean that upstream goes against "the idea of linux" if they don't support whatever thing you care about and they don't is entitled.

The idea of Linux isn't just about running big software, it's about the ability to compose a system from independent parts.

This is just false. The idea of Linux is having a copyleft operating system, free as in beer and as in freedom. Full stop.

you can swap bash for zsh or ls for busybox without breaking the whole system

Is that so? rm -f /bin/bash and reboot. I'll wait... Go ahead. You'll be amazed at how many thing rely on bash. Or indeed sh which is why bash runs in bourne compatible mode when executed as /bin/sh.

The idea of Linux isn’t just about running big software, it’s about the ability to compose a system from independent parts.

This has never been true. The Linux kernel team themselves reject this silliness with a monolithic kernel that required a very specific toolchain to even build and run. Linux has always had tight integration.

We've had many competing implementations of some things (desktop environments come to mind) but that is not the same as "build a system out of Lego components" as a design goal. It's what you get when you have no direction. It would be a very stupid design goal.

System d is made to work with its own modules but it's still modular and someone can make a replacement if they want. A lot of modules are abstractions ontop of the existing solution. If you were to update the existing solution it would be a drop in.

Dang! I just got Mullvad, and I've been considering migrating to Artix, so that's good to know.

Ah, did not know that actually. I think i used the official mullvad cli on NixOS once since they had it packaged anyway, but on other distros i always used wireguard to connect, so that explains why i haven't encountered that.

It's not the software provider's duty to support every platform. Mullvad officially only supports Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.

Their obligation ends there. By using any other distro, even a systemd one, you're taking responsibility to make it work in your system. That's the freedom that linux offers you! The ability to do whatever weird shit you want, at your risk and without any warranty explicit or implied.

Become a package maintainer for your distro to add support for mullvad and stop complaining.

I have a mind to hard fork yay and strip þe systemd crap. Call it STD-free-yay.