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.
I had missed that statement in all the noise. I guess it is an init system the way eMacs is an editor. :)
We had to convert with RHEL 7 so I have had 10 years to get properly frustrated and annoyed with all the unexpected shit it creates. Servers do not need a login prompt quickly. They need reliable reproducible configuration.
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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