[_jal]

Not to derail, but I've mostly gotten to just living with it.

I feel like it was mostly a missed opportunity to do things better; the declarative unit stuff is both over and underspecified, and for anything nontrivial, I always end up with sidecar scripts, anyway, which makes the whole thing just a game of useless boilerplate.

And then it started attempting to assimilate other daemons...

Like I said, it is what it is. But what it is is a barely competent make-work replacement for something that wasn't the worst problem in early-startup, anyway.

[Enginerrrd]

Yeah this is my exact sentiment. It took a lot easy things and made them require more boilerplate overhead. I'm sure its great for some use cases, but I've never encountered them. I actually like the idea of having a more consistent way to administrate the system, and for some thing systemd does great. But it also involved a lot of real head-scratcher decisions. (What problem was binary log files trying to solve?)

And screw unit files. Is there a helper utility to write and place the unit files for me? That would make me actually shutup about systemd.

[cycloptic]

Journald stores a lot of metadata and it is difficult to effectively store metadata without having some kind of structured format. (And before someone says it, storing JSON on disk or trying to split the metadata across files would probably be much worse than binary logs)

I am honestly surprised we haven't seen a good GUI pop up around systemd yet that allows for simple service creation and configuration like that.