I just don't buy the Red Hat 'take over' conspiracy...
I think Red Hat want it, Red Hat probably like to see other distros adopting it, but no one is really forcing any of those distros to do so. The idea that loads of software just won't run and that they're being railroaded into adoption is just FUD.
Poettering's notorious comments e.g. towards gentoo show arrogance, but don't amount to "adopt systemd, it's the only way". It's just Poettering being a plonker. The kid lacks maturity and is in fact a typical software developer. Linux Torvalds and others have said far worse, yet no complaints from the fans...
I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them. To me, security is important. But it's no less important than everything else that is also important!
Then there's
Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.
Clearly he's in cahoots with 'M$'...
Any desktop environment or piece of subsystem or whatever switching to hard dependencies on systemd or it's services will still run without it, or if there's no other option will run with some kind of user space implementation of those services - the last resort is a fork. Forks are what this is all about, forks are supposed to happen to keep everything healthy. Software like udev, systemd, gnome, kde, etc is what should be getting forked - not entire distributions...
So if systemd does 'take over', which is entirely possible, it's really because a) the majority wanted that and b) those who didn't, just sat back and did nothing.
It's not simply "impossible" to code around the systemd dependencies. It can be done if someone wants to sit down and write the code. This is nothing new, it happens all the time.
If this doesn't happen, it's because people are not interested in making it happen. If your Linux distribution of choice is no longer fit for your needs, then it's time for a change. If you have zealous leanings towards using or avoiding certain software or certain types of software, then a distribution with a structure like Debian's is probably not for you. Find a distribution with a smaller group of developers or a BDFL who's objectives and goals most closely match your own.
If someone can't change, can't/doesn't want to code their way out, doesn't want to learn something new and is shackled to their Linux distribution and simply wants to complain endlessly about this, then I have to wonder why they bothered with Linux in the first place.