Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

The year is 2013 and I am hopping mad.

systemd is replacing my plaintext logs with a binary format and pumping steroids into init and it is laughing at me. The unix philosophy cries out: is this the end of Linux (or, as many are calling it, GNU plus Linux)?

The year is 2025 and I’m here to repent. Not only is systemd a worthy successor to traditional init, but I think that it deserves a defense for what it’s done for the landscape – especially given the hostile reception it initially received (and somehow continues to receive? for some reason?). No software is perfect – except for TempleOS – but I think that systemd has largely been a success story and proven many dire forecasts wrong (including my own). I was wrong!
↫ Tyler Langlois

The article goes into detail on a number of awesome features, niceties, and clever things systemd has, and they’re legion. Even as a mere user, I like systemd, as every time I have had to or wanted to interact with it, it’s been a joy to use, with excellent documentation making it remarkably easy even for someone like me to get into it without doing any damage or breaking anything. Every time I read up on system’d more advanced features, I’m surprised by how well thought out and implemented it all seems to be.

I’ve experienced several major leaps forward in the Linux world that made using Linux on my computers easier and more reliable, and the adoption of systemd stands among them as one of the biggest leaps forward desktop Linux has ever made. The idea of going back to a random piles of non-standardized init scripts with nebulous dependencies from varying sources and wildly different levels of quality seems like a complete nightmare to me.

There’s a lot of charm in doing things ‘the old way’, and I’m not saying you’re wrong for wanting an init system that tries to do less, or that’s easier to read and parse for you, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean systemd is bad, evil, or part of a Red Hat conspiracy to kill Linux.