Which userspace are you claiming is better then? Linux used to offer the best userland experience in the world, because you had control over every part of it, and since things were loosely coupled you could mix and match at will (e.g. prefer BSD grep or Solaris tar? No problem, install them).
> Somehow, this ended in a holy war and corresponding schism. It makes no sense to me. Are linux users upset that someone dared question their decades of suffering under a poorly-designed userspace? Agree or disagree with systemd's decisions, it's hard to fault someone for making and releasing software and offering it as an alternative, even if it sucks.
They didn't build a better alternative and let users choose to adopt it organically. They made a wilfully incompatible, tightly coupled thing, and then pressured other projects to hard-depend on it (e.g. Gnome).
This is quite literally the antithesis of everything that Linux and Unix stands for. The whole reason people were able to use the GNU tools with the Linux kernel is because they are loosely coupled and communicate through standardised interfaces. Systemd by contrast doesn't run anywhere but linux, and you need closely matched versions of everything: your linux has to match your udev has to match your systemd has to match your dbus has to match your gnome has to match your...
If systemd had been around when GNU and Linux were starting out, the whole project would have been literally impossible. It's a betrayal of everything those projects stand for.