Yes, it is much more convenient, and as an init system there isn't much wrong with it. But in software change for change's sake alone is simply wrong, it creates friction because a lot of knowledge has to be discarded and then has to be replaced by different knowledge. Large amounts of regression testing suddenly become useless which will generate ample opportunity for re-hashes of old bugs and issues (see linked article).

Modular designs are good, monolithic designs are bad. Dependencies are bad and so on. Lots of choices at the design level were made against fairly hard won knowledge on how to architect complex software systems. All these dependencies translate into 'all or nothing' and that is never a good thing in the software world. It's just another form of lock-in, something that the world of closed source software is good at and I'm quite sad to see it pollute the world of open source.

Edit: I suspect a lot of the pushback against systemd - mertited or not - is because a lot of people in charge of little parts of the bazaar have seen their pet projects cast aside by the major distros and taken over by the systemd devs. In a world where street cred is a big force in motivating people to contribute to open source being maintainer of 'x' where 'x' is part of each and every linux distro out there and then to see 'x' taken over by systemd in a fairly rough manner without any kind of co-operation between the old maintainers and the new kids on the block there are bound to be a lot of ruffled feathers. But that's not technology, that's just ego.

systemd fixes a lot of problems for a lot of people, and it wasn't "change for change's sake" - SysV-style init was a mess, and a sad leftover from a time when disks were mechanical, and many other things that amount as anachronisms in 2016.

If we never replace things with better things, we'd be using superpowered DOS machines to this day. I don't get the "knowledge has to be discarded and then has to be replaced by different knowledge" argument if the new knowledge is of a better tool.

I'm not all in with systemd's ethos, but I don't see a significantly better tool around.

Your comment sounds like preaching.

> when disks were mechanical

DISKS are STILL mechanical. They will always be. That is why it's called a disk. You thinking is limited to fancy laptops and not considering enterprise servers.

> If we never replace things with better things

Better? That is far too strong. Things are not always better but making certain use cases easier. That does not mean it's better. Systemd has nice features, indeed; but it's also limiting in terms of losing the capabilities of full blown shell script. Sometimes this latter is very handy.

Edit: Downvote? Nice. Try commenting instead.

> You thinking is limited to fancy laptops and not considering enterprise servers.

All of the servers I manage except for a few legacy ones are SSDs by now, for the simple reason that they are cheaper to operate at this point:

They consume less energy, and while their price per GB is high, their IOPS per GB is high enough that we can get away with far fewer replicas of each item of data and still get good enough performance.

I can't afford not to use SSDs in every new server we provision.

Not using SSDs in your servers today means you're behind the curve except in certain niches where performance doesn't matter but sheer storage volume does. That too is set to change within the next couple of years with current rates of cost reductions.

No downvote from me but spinning disks are on the way out, all across the board including enterprise servers. It will take a while but they will definitely not 'always be' around. See also: vinyl records. They still exist but mainstream has moved on.

Disks are still present. They are way cheaper, so especially under big data, they are still irreplaceable.

For now. Making unqualified statements about the future is where the problem lies. In the long run, silicon will win over spinning rust and 'the long run' seems to be a lot shorter than we previously thought.

Disks are more expensive for most server use today than SSDs. You can't just look at cost per GB. You need to look at cost to process per GB, and then the vastly increased IOPS and transfer rates provided by SSDs makes them cheaper for most applications where data is regularly accessed at this point.

There are niches, such as long term archival, backups, etc. where disks may still be competitive, but even those are rapidly being eroded.

For things like web servers or database servers, I'll never provision another machine without SSDs.

You don't provide any argument. 'It runs on my machines' is akin to 'it runs on my laptop'. Previous system was working, battle tested, was _not_ broken, was not polluting user space. And these are just a few arguments fished from above and other commends here. Now - to defend the new system which will have to prove it's value and stability in the next 20 years or so- what good is it? What awesomeness brings to the table?

Maybe the previous init system was not quite broken, but it had massive drawbacks, and it was not for nothing that many alternatives have sprung up in the last 10-15 years. But most of those tried to limit their scope, while the current winner unfortunately doesn't.

From the little I know, socket activation seems to be systemd's main attractive item.

The main issue is that the amount of stuff that systemd does, and the level of integration all the various parts of systemd have with each other across undocumented or unstable APIs, means that it becomes more and more difficult to replace any of it over time - we're tied to systemd as the one true system management suite until somebody can replace all of it, it's very difficult (and decidedly unsupported) to replace it piecemeal.

In fact, the only reason systemd can do what it does is because those other systems were modular.

And thus if the tradeoff is worth it for you, then you should be free to use it. But do not foist it on the rest of us.

what annoys me is for all these changes linux still can't get a proper, graphical, flicker free boot sequence.

Patches are welcome