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There is no doubt that Lennart Poettering is a brilliant programmer, regardless of other things that has been said about him.

It will be very interesting to see what will happen to systemd now, if mr Poettering is leaving for Microsoft to abandon systemd or if it is because Microsoft is so much in love with Linux that they are planning on sponsoring his work on systemd, is something that we will have to find out in the near future.

If he actually is leaving the future of systemd up for others to decide upon, then we may see something akin to the development of PulseAudio which, under his supervision, was going to revolutionize the linux multimedia experience. Beside from introducing new (and, at that point, unseen) magnitudes of complexity in the configuration department, it still provided a modern sound experience. We could enjoy sounds from various and simultaneous sources at the same time, an unheard of luxury at that point. At the start of the project the promise was low latency sound at the same level of flexibility as on both Windows and Macos. PulseAudio was intended to take over everything from juggling the bits with the audio adapters to communicating with the programs that needed sound. Lennart invented many interesting use cases, for his subsystem, many involving sound over the network. What happened was that PulseAudio became such a feature rich system that it got ported to both Windows and Macos, regardless of the claims that both those systems where the main sources of inspiration for PulseAudio.

After that Lennart Poettering abandoned PulseAudio, the project has given up some of the original visions, for instance nobody seems to want to replace the ALSA audio adapter drivers for "native" PulseAudio modules.

We will probably see a similar development regarding systemd, some of the less useful functions will get removed from systemd, the interfaces will get more stable and the various systemd modules will become actual modules, that can (and will) be implemented by other programs when needed.

We may see some rethinking regarding session management, compared to service management; what is good for service management may not be (even) useful for session management. There has been a lot of confusion about what simple commands like su are supposed to do under systemd, those things should be easily sorted, with a more pragmatic leadership. Another similar note is how systemd figures it needs to do something about my desktops sound output when my screen saver activates. With systemd its seems like a major headache setting up your desktop in a way that you can play music in your speakers, while you are fixing yourself a nice cup of drink. On a general level, systemd becoming more stable and less of a moving target will definitely save us all a lot of work. Systemd may never become an alternative to either LXC, OpenVZ, or Docker, but most of us will not be sorry for that.