[tannhaeuser]

You certainly have a point re bad shell scripts. But imho advocating a wholesale service manager monolith like systemd isn't the answer (fallacy of the excluded middle and all).

Unix admins must come to learn what they're doing somehow. The way they learn it is by going one step after another, beginning with simplistic shell scripts controlling isolated functionalities, then improving it etc. Do one thing, and do it well, Unix philosophy, whatever. For novice Unix admins, systemd is too much of a black box, without any kind of didactic curriculum leading to it or away from it. Folks cannot grow into becoming a senior Unix admin.

I've seen it first hand just recently where a customer of mine went all-in (on puppet in this case). The "admins" were merely clicking around and doing trial and error kind of things; they had absolutely no idea what they're doing, and when things are going south won't be able to even diagnose what's going on. They hated their job and went out the door at 5pm. They stayed and were very eager to learn, however, when I gave them an ad-hoc Unix command line survival guide.

Systemd and its ilk is not how you get responsible and competent Unix admins that take pride in their work.

[digi_owl]

> Systemd and its ilk is not how you get responsible and competent Unix admins that take pride in their work.

I other words perfect fodder for Red Hat support contracts (anyone getting flashbacks of MSCEs?)...