[geofft]

It's true that a traditional-style init has few bugs on its own, but that means you're moving all the service management, logging, etc. complexity somewhere else, and that gets both buggy and messy. I have many stories of systemd making the overall architecture simpler and thereby both solving bugs and doing things that we had resigned ourselves to not being worth the complexity.

(It's possible other "modern" inits could also do this well, and I do continue to believe that systemd in particular is not the best code even if I agree with its architecture, but it's the best out there as far as I know of the ones that actually exist. Many years ago I ran into an unsolvable bug with Upstart and a particular complex setup that I couldn't even minimize into a useful bug report. I've had problems with systemd, same as I've had problems with, say, Linux and glibc, but they've all been quite solvable.)