[MozzieW]

I'd disagree, there's a huge amount of evidence not to use it, mainly in the form of thousands of forum and bug tracking posts with very genuine complaints and issues with systemd.

Many of those posts have been met with ignorance from the developers, even resorting to "it's not a bug" when it clearly is. Systemd has been pushed into distros based on improvement of boot times (their PR), not as a basis of a stable replacement of an init system. There were no problems of existing init systems to resolve, and SSD's have made the boot times pointless. My fully-loaded Devuan install boots 3 seconds quicker than Mint, Solus or Fedora.

Genuine outstanding issues highlighted in the forums are things like not being able to get unit files to start services at boot up, difficulty in finding start up errors due to the order of other services starting, errors not showing up in logs and untraceable boot delays. These are not made up, just take a look at forum threads tagged with systemd.

It has also become much more than an init system. This has resulted in bigger dependency issues, in turn resulting in not being able to install some applications purely because of a dependency on systemd somewhere down the chain. On non-systemd distros applications don't care which init system you use.

It's not negative PR, it's real users having real issues that have had something pushed on to them. For systemd's original portrayed purpose there is no reason devs couldn't have spent their time creating configuration utilities for the existing inits. At least when something breaks on the established ones, there is only an init system to look at.