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.

Yes. Yes it is. systemd isn't bad for boot times, but more for tying so many goddamn things to init, PID1, creating just about the best attack point one could ever ask for. Wayland not being ready can be solved by not using it for the time being. Just use X. Also, it's still called plymouth.

I am for most part quite happy with it. For all the complexity it brings, it also allows you to do a lot of stuff easily and reliable that would have been a nightmare with previous systems.

My biggest nitpick is that some commands are needlessly obtuse, e.g. trying to find an error message in journalctl is a mess when you aren't already deeply familiar with the tool. It will show you messages that are months old by default, will give exactly the same output for typos in the unit name as it will for no error messages and other little things like that.

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'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.

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.

no

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.

The traditional init systems suited me just fine, i saw no need to change them. If they were so bad, then they could've been fixed or replaced.

The migration to systemd felt forced. Debian surprised everyone with the change. Also systemd's development is/was backed by corporate Red Hat, their lead developer wasn't exactly loved either and is now working for Microsoft. Of course Canonical's Ubuntu adopted it as well. Overall feels like Windows' svchost.exe, hence people accusing it of vendor lock-in.

It's not just an init system, it's way waaay more. It's supposed to be modular, but good luck keeping only its PID1 in a distro that supports systemd. It breaks the "do one thing right" approach and, in practice, does take away choice which pisses me off.

I had been using Debian since Woody, but that make me change to Gentoo on my desktop which, to me, took the best path: they default to OpenRC but you're free to use systemd if you want to. That's choice. For servers i now prefer Slackware and the laptop runs Devuan whenever i boot it up.

To be fair systemd hasn't shown its ugly face in the Ubuntu VMs i'm forced to use at work.

YMMV. If you're happy with it, fine. This, of course, is only my opinion.