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Who brings your machine up. Your call.
The init system is the first thing that runs after the kernel — it boots the rest of your system and usually supervises services. It's also one of the most fought-over pieces of modern Linux. Keru's answer to the fight is simple: pick one yourself.
Small, fast, BSD-style. Default in Keru — fast boot, simple service supervision, based on the runit process supervisor.
The skarnet suite's init and service manager. Dependency-free, designed-for-service supervision, very small.
The classic Gentoo-style init. Compatible with sysvinit-style init.d, predictable "exclusive" service tree.
The dominant init — service manager, logind, udev, resolved, timedate, all in one. If you want it, it's a choice, not an assumption.
The bare init from busybox. Minimalist, tiny static binaries, closest to "nothing but a process supervisor."
The classic System V init. Simple runlevels, init.d scripts, historically the baseline Linux init.
A modern, fast, dependency-oriented init and service manager. Parallel boot, small footprint.
GNU's service manager (init). Guile-based, declarative services, part of the GNU project.
Some combinations are easier than others. The stability check in the installer flags pairs that aren't yet proven (for example, musl + systemd), but never blocks them — the warn-not-block stance.