[yellowapple]

Also speaking as a sysadmin, I've found "every way" to be inaccurate. Initscripts have their limitations, but the most glaring issues with them (lots of boilerplate, hard to write, etc.) have been resolved in BSD Land for quite a while, thanks to things like rc.subr.

systemd does have some nice features that I've come to appreciate on my GNU/Linux boxen, but I'm still not exactly sold when my OpenBSD boxen have a mostly-sane rc system not subject to most of the problems the systemd crowd claims are inherent to initscript-based systems.

[davidgerard]

true, I'm talking about fairly generic Ubuntu VMs out in the fog. But basically, the facilities available cover my common use cases very nicely on the occasions I actually have to write a startup script - I'm finding an upstart config vastly preferable to cobbling together an init shell script, and have yet (out of about 5-10 cases) had to resort to a shell script.