[viraptor]

Are you sure it's not just familiarity with old tools? Systemd works pretty hard to put logs in one place (journald) - even ones from service start-ups. And any dbus interaction can be traced by listening to the system bus. Is that a mess compared to the old bunch of separate log files and errors lost if they don't activate their logging interface early enough?

[generalizations]

I'm not talking about reading logs. (Which, by the way, is a lot easier to do in a dead system when they're text and not binary. It's hard to mess up cat, grep, and notepad.)

I'm talking about being able to rule out causes because the primary components of the system are independent of each other.

[viraptor]

> is a lot easier to do in a dead system when they're text and not binary

The binary format doesn't matter for browsing logs. Replace `cat /your/custom/service/file.log | grep ...` with `journalctl -u service | grep ...` (or just `-a` for everything)

I'd actually argue it's easier not to mess up with journal with simple tools, because you don't have to special-case `service`, `service.1`, `service.2.gz` files.

[Nursie]

For a dead system with it's main disk mounted on a living one, on which the service is not registered, is it that easy?

I've never tried.

I like service files, but the rest not so much.

[Macha]

journalctl -D /mnt/othersystemroot/var/log/journal <...>