OpenRC vs Upstart

OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.

All configuration is done via shell scripts and symlinks. Shell scripts can then use various specialized utilities to ease the development of init scripts.

OpenRC builds on top of sysvinit and adds some more useful features (like parallel booting) while still the simplicity that sysvinit is know for. Because of this it generally boots faster than other init systems, especially when parallel booting is enabled.

Does one thing and does it well.

Using OpenRC does not lock in a distribution by providing specific NON-POSIX extra services which programs then would rely on.

Basically OpenRC doesn't replace SysV init, but rather works with it, providing features that SysV is lacking while taking advantage of its benefits. It's also used by a fair amount of reasonably popular distros and is well supported and developed.

Uses multi-core and ram very efficiently.

It can be ported to other UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.

I can add a new startup script for most cases in under five minutes. The ability to quickly insert new applications into the system is a big help.

It always initializes a system the same way; if OpenRC booted and ran a system properly today, it will boot and run properly tomorrow, and the next day.

Since it is event based, it was simple to have interdependent services emit status messages each other. Service start ordering and shutdown was easily managed in one conf file.

The "lazy" start of systemd is BS and is a mess to debug . service unit files have no clue what another service state is. The maintainers add arbitrary timers that add more complexity and more init hangs. The systemd documentation is poor. When a service fails to start (or stop) systemd follows the Microsoft model of not telling the reason why.