Linux

For someone coming from NeXTStep (BSD based), having worked with SCO, various BSD and mostly Linux for the last 20 years, the worst thing about systemd is documentation that's easily accessible/readable for people used to a traditional init system.

"How do I get it to do special use case X" was a basically unanswerable question when it got dragged into the mainstream (for reasons I can very well understand - the reasons for the dragging, that is, the bad docs, not so much).

Maybe that's improved in the mean time - I wouldn't know, I had to figure it out back then and now I know its lingo when searching and such.

no

As service manager systemd nice, but look all services:

systemd + systemd/journal + systemd/Timers
systemd-boot
systemd-creds
systemd-cryptenroll
systemd-firstboot
systemd-home
systemd-logind
systemd-networkd
systemd-nspawn
systemd-resolved
systemd-stub
systemd-sysusers
systemd-timesyncd

That's look as overkill. I use only systemd, journald, systemd-boot, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved and systemd-timesyncd, but that a lot systemd. Feel like system make monolith.

systemd-nspawn for example. Systems manager for containers. Seriously. Why than exists? I don't understand. Really, someone use that daemon?

I go crazy over boot times, systems is faster on every machine I’ve tried it on. The biggest difference I’ve seen is replacing grub, both systems-boot and car-boot seem to shave off a decent amount.

I'm honestly a big fan. Systemd-init has tons of options like run targets, sandbox options, users you want things to run as, etc. System-oomd has tons of qol stuff for desktop users to help with stutter and responsiveness. I am also kind of excited for UKI that systemd-boot is set to support.

SystemD is blamed for long boot times

That is and always was nonsense. Systemd shortens boot times by starting things in parallel. That's one of its key features.

There are some things to note about that:

Systemd only starts services in parallel when it isn't told otherwise by Before and/or After settings in the service files. This makes it pretty easy to make systemd slow by misconfiguring it. You can use the systemd-analyze program to see which services held up your boot.

Systemd has a very long default timeout (90 seconds) for starting or stopping a service. It's appropriate for the big, lumbering servers that systemd was probably designed for, but it might be wise to shorten the timeout on desktops, where a service taking more than 5 seconds to start is almost certainly broken. It's a setting in /etc/systemd/system.conf.

Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?

I'm an early adopter of systemd. I installed it on my Debian desktops pretty much as soon as it was available in Debian, and I later started moving servers to it as well. I had long been jealous of Windows NT's service manager, and systemd is exactly what I had hoped would come to Linux one day.

Yes, the rant you're talking about is old, and yes, systemd is better now than it was then, but not in the sense of what the rant was complaining about. The rant was already patent nonsense when it was written, which has given me a very dim view of the anti-systemd crowd.

Besides systemd proper, they also spent a lot of time ranting about the journal system, which redirects syslog entries into a set of binary log files. They complained that this would make logs impossible to read in emergencies. This isn't even close to being true—any emergency bootable Linux image worth its salt has a copy of journalctl on it—and the binary nature of systemd's logs has caused me serious problems on exactly zero occasions.

No. The people with a raging hate boner for systemd are just a vocal minority in lots of online Linux spaces.

Most people either don't care or actively prefer it. Personally, I much prefer unit files to hacking away at init scripts or whatever the fuck Upstart was.

I make plymouth do the verbose mode because it's cool and hacker-y. Also I like when it says "failed" and I know what failed. For a few weeks I kept having to manually start firewalld and I never would have known otherwise, update seems to have fixed that though.

Tbf, I really only have experience with fedora and thus systemd, so, I like it but I "don't know what I'm missing" in a sense.

As a guy that's been installing Linux since you had to compile network drivers and adjust the init scripts to use them; SystemD rocks.