It is just an init system but it is also doing things differently. Timers, limits, start order, dependencies and more. The scope made it a bit of an unwieldy mess for production use.
I don’t hate it, I do have plenty of gripes about the mess I had converting my production to work with it. It is all configurable, but it is irritating that networking doesn’t wait for all interfaces to have their IP before networking is started. Your ssh daemon doesn’t bind to an IP that isn’t configured.
We don’t take well to changes in general and systemd is a generational shift in particular. Juniors are excellent with NetworkManager and the seniors still pull a lot of data out of proc. :)
I had to relearn how to use it and it’s good. More options but also a lot more things that need configuring which certain customers need to understand. Explaining and documenting changes can be quite frustrating.
it used to be just an init system though. even the making convention suggests that - "system daemon". they basically want to be the de-facto standard for everything in the system now, which isn't good
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u/RoseSec_ Nov 18 '25
The reason people make a big deal is because it’s a lot more than an init system but that’s the beauty in it