[Myk267]

Does anyone else feel like the only reason to choose systemd is the systemd-journal? That thing is just amazing. The amount of leverage provided by not just appending to a log file somewhere will really get the juices moving in anyone who ever had to write some ad-hoc parser to do the same thing poorly.

If anyone hasn't tried out systemd or journalctl yet, I suggest running a copy of Arch Linux in a virtual machine.

[Zancarius]

I think the unit files are another reason. Over the years, my patience with differing ideas of how an initscript should function has waned to the point that it's almost an exercise in frustration if it's not something you regularly write on a platform you seldom use. Unit files alone make systemd a breath of fresh air, because familiarizing yourself with them requires reading only the manpages (and even then only the applicable portions). Even somewhat esoteric behaviors are readily supported without much effort.

I realize initscripts are "simple" in the sense that they borrow immediately from the shell and therefore possess all the advantages (and disadvantages) implied by such. Unfortunately, the notion of a sane initscript seems to be greatly varied in the sense that it depends largely on the distribution and the package maintainers. It isn't that they're necessarily difficult to write as much as having the power of the shell available inclines some authors to do very stupid things.

Comparatively speaking, a unit file should be exceptionally easy to understand at first blush.