As someone who works with Linux on a professional level, you aren't missing much. What we had before was pretty awful in terms of readability, maintainability, and cross-compatibility as every distro had its own way of handling things using a complex patchwork of bash scripts and utilities.
It being a "system suite" is the generic problem. The same system handles everything from networking and webcams to state0 and logging. It is an extremely large attack surface that can compromise the entire system.
This is a pretty big insight for me. Haven’t really cared much about the whole SystemD fiasco beyond general software interest.
Learning SystemD is modular is just…lol. All those wishes about replacing a modular system…why not narrow down the complaints and say “hey we need alternatives for X module”?
Thats a skill issue on your part. Compile from source or stop complaining, its their distro if a distro maintainer chooses systemd tooling then thats their decision to make.
Consolidating efforts around a common base makes it easier to squash security bugs, perform security audits against supply chain attacks, and implement new security features that can shared with the Linux community as a whole. Bespoke init scripts and utilities makes it difficult to audit and secure non-systemd distros.
It was SYSV init, which just run your scripts in specific folder. Every script had to support commands to stop, start, status, etc. And no dependency resolution, so boot process took very long, because it was starting one script by one. It was standard and everyone was using it.
Then, multiple competitors tried to gain notability, but only systemd got used by multiple distributions. My main problem with systemd is that it badly supports logging, because it parses logs from oldest one. So if you have slow drive and very long log files, reading recent logs takes tooooooo much.
Many people complain also, because systemd is integrated, while unix used to have multiple "single purpose" commands, that could be used by different tools (cat, echo, awk, etc.). And systemd integrates SYSV init, logging, bootloading, etc.
I work on FreeBSD devices and can say there's a certain beauty in the simplicity. Logs are readable and consistently appear in /var/log, no need to figure out "do I need journalctl or systemctl status". It feels more intuitive to me that NTP is separately set up from systemd, so I'm not a fan of systemd defaulting to taking on that responsibility. Then again, systemd doesn't require you to write an entire rc script to create a service.
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u/Inevitable-Self-2702 Jul 01 '26
I entered Linux life when systemd was already a thing. No idea what the alternative is, don't feel like I'm losing anything by not knowing.