I have fond memories of Solaris, but I'm pretty much on OpenBSD for good these days. It's really head-and-shoulders above anything else available these days, IMO. The closest alternative that I'd find acceptable might be Arch, but gosh, systemd is one of those things that just make me hate running systems.
You should have a look at Void Linux[1] (if you ever wanted to give Linux another shot). It uses runit for init instead of systemd and offers musl as an actively supported alternative to glibc. Its package manager is similar to the one in Arch in that it provides both rolling-release binary packages as well as a ports-style build system. Void also incorporates OpenBSD's LibreSSL by default. Everything else is kept as minimal and simple as possible.
Very cool efforts. I will look into this as an alternative to some of our production systems where we've had to use Ubuntu instead of OpenBSD (for support of certain stacks).
One can also use the same toolset on FreeBSD/TrueOS. OpenBSD, alas, fails to provide some necessary functionality for everything to be similarly possible; but many of the tools can work there, and I use them on OpenBSD myself (alongside OpenBSD versions of the djbwares toolset).
I had no problems with sysv init since the 80s and SVR2. Did it exist before? I'm only drawing on personal experience.
I have failed to see any benefits of systemd and it has only caused me problems. Most in my circle agree with this, and I have never heard someone express gratitude that systemd exists. We feel it has been forced upon us, and we don't want to make a full time job out of maintaining our own platforms to be rid of it.
We are crotchety old men who have generated hundreds of millions of dollars (maybe more) for our employers and customers. We have never had a problem with init. Compared to ourselves, we think Lennart is a noob and examining his work leads us to conclude that he has no rational foundation of applied computing.
The software developers I've known in my career have all been professional and responsible. Our industry has zero tolerance for failures and hazards. During ten years I worked there, one place shipped one defect that I found out about, and the manager who signed off on it after incomplete testing lost his career. I deal with bad software every day and wish more of the industry had this focus on quality. I used to respect rhel because of their QA, now they hired this guy, did he even have a job before?
I wish Lennart the best in his quest to make a Windows out of what used to be Unix, with his audio mixer and cli version of 'services.exe.' Legions of misguided people who believe that Linux is the golden desktop OS for laypeople will certainly appreciate this. However I hope I never meet him because I do not want to pay his hospital costs.
My biggest problem with systemd is that it adds a new and completely unnecessary giant wall of incompatibility/incongruity between Linux and the rest of the *nix universe.
It was and is absolutely asinine and I can't believe all of the major linux distros went along with it.
