[vetinari]

Apple launchd is way more limited, and has much narrower scope (single-seated, single-session desktop). We could talk days about features that systemd provides and launchd doesn't.

I've seen only single case of criticism of systemd that was correct and constructive (too bad I didn't bookmark it); I don't count rants that boil down to "it's different than I'm used to", or "it has broken my broken nfs config" as plenty or well argumented.

The efi issue was indeed a bug in the devices. If was up to the manufacturer to fix it, not for other software to maintain workarounds indefinitely.

[eecc]

“way more limited” is a feature not a bug! Eventually Systemd will grow a binary configuration registry, but by then people won’t see the irony of it any more

[vetinari]

It s a bug, not a feature. I like how systemd can reliably track even double-forked processes, or how can I override only tiny parts of the unit definition, without having to rewrite the entire unit and thus the original definition is still updatable by upstream packages. Or how it can inform me, in what state either the given unit or the entire system is, including last few lines from the log. Or that there is unified system for unit activation no matter how they are activated (on startup, on socket, on timer, on demand by dbus, etc). Or that it can properly solve dependencies among services, and miriad of similar, small things, that together make a huge qualitative difference.

Ironically from your snark, systemd uses simple ini files. Launchd uses a specially bloated xml, because plists.

[eecc]

We grew up with different UNIX philosophies in mind. IMHO, even Launchd’s cron+init+inetd was a stretch, you’re cool with a second OS sandwiched between kernel and user. Have fun