/etc/inittab in Jessie?

I know there are several projects designed to avoid systemd or reduce its entanglement, but it's a bit early to tell which will stand the test of time.

How do you install the basic OS without the GUI? With or without the network services? Can you tune down the installed system to some 500MB or so?

Ironically Windows 10 can do almost that on RPi - allegedly.

My initial experience with systemd was a test VM to pathfind Mageia 2 installation. The installation went smoothly. First boot of the installation hung for several minutes with no explanation on the console. Then, systemd timed out and finished booting but with only some of the RAIDs started and only some of the filesystems mounted--a crippled condition.

One of systemd's architectural problems is there are no text log files to troubleshoot that kind of problem. The binary journal requires specialized tools to extract the information. A helpful person on a newsgroup suggested one tool, but its package was not installed. I had to install the tool package onto a crippled system in order to get any information about the cause of the problem. The only information available was a Gantt-chart-like sequence diagram showing it had hung for several minutes and then proceeded--which I already knew.

After that experience, I decided that if ever only a handful of people on this planet are running Linux/Unix-type systems without systemd, I intend to be one of them. Only after that decision did I become aware that Linus has reportedly prohibited a couple of systemd developers from committing any kernel patches until they clean up their act and that valid systemd bug reports are indiscriminately marked "won't fix". Since then, I have had to implement workarounds to systemd's shortcomings at work.

I intend to switch to one of the BSD variants before switching to systemd for any systems over which I have control.

HTH

Never heard of Slackware? Also available for ARM.

It appears that Microsoft have noticed that they have lost the market of embedded software to Linux, and now they think that they can quickly gain that back by showing an embedded version of Windows.

It will probably have some effect as some people will always follow Microsoft (just like IBM in the old days), but I doubt that they can ever turn around this development, which of course was also highly motivated by the fact that Linux is free (as in free beer).

As much as Microsoft wants to be the dominant supplier, it may well be that today more processors are running Linux than Windows.

It's the first distro I ever used. But Volkerding hasn't (AFAIK) come out against systemd, he's just not rushing in to adopt it before he has to. Meanwhile systemd doesn't work with the BSDs, nor is it ever intended to.

M$ shot themselves in the foot when they killed off WinMobile/WinCE 6 without apparently providing a successor that could run the same apps on more or less the same hardware.

That killed off more or less all cheap portable hardware, leaving only the TomTom satnavs (which have always used some sort of *nix clone) and everything else that isn't a phone or tablet running Android or iOS. This in turn seems to have also killed all the applications that used to run under WM6: precious few of them seem to have reappeared on new hardware or OSen.

Further to that, there are now a number of *dedicated* embedded OSs that have proper deterministic characteristics. MS hasn't a hope of competing with them

- mind you, neither does Linux really!

As somebody who used Microware's excellent OS9/68000 operating system for well over 10 years before switching to Linux over the next 5 years (and still use the os9exec emulator to run some systems run in the Sculptor

OS9 was designed from the ground up as a multi-user, multi-process realtime OS with the ability to provide predictable response times, which is something that Linux cannot do.

OS9 was as nice to use as Linux once I'd replaced the original command shell with the bash-like EFFO shell, and was amazingly reliable. I don't think I ever found a bug in the OS, the compilers or the utilities collection.

What those hardware developers need is usually not those specific realtime details but a big pile of software to pick from to assemble their product in a a stick-together-building-blocks-plus-one-application fashion. With Linux they don't have only a kernel but a large collection of user programs that they can use without modification or development. And they all come for free. That is why you find Linux in many routers, settop boxes, navigation equipment, phones, tables, etc etc.

OS9/68000 cannot really compete with that, and neither can Windows.

True enough, though don't forget that said software heap is and was all open source and often trivially easy to port to any UNIX-alike OS. OS9 had a sufficiently similar process model to make that reasonably easy. I had flex & bison running on it once gcc had been ported..

I think cost has at least as much to do with that. Linux and clones is free. QNX, OS9000, WinMobile, etc. aren't.

Agreed.