We're moving more and more to having unified low-level services across Unices, so it stops being about stupid things like "Oh sorry, Arch can't run this because it uses its own audio stack even if we're just using audio to make a notification sound", and starts being about the things that are fundamentally different about the systems.

Think about how nice it is that we don't have to recompile most things for most kernel versions. Why do we have to set up multiple startup script mechanisms?

Yes, nobody has ever had to recompile their application to work on a new kernel. If you mean that's nice that there's binary backwards compatibility, I agree. I don't see what this has to do with supporting multiple systems.

> Why do we have to set up multiple startup script mechanisms?

Why do we have to support multiple <insert any kind of software> ?

> We're moving more and more to having unified low-level services across Unices

AFAIK, the only thing I know of moving toward middleware unification specifically is Linux desktop software. Choosing to use systemd in exclusion of everything else is "unification" in the same way that nationalism/xenophobia/homophobia are. (i'm aware of how mean that sounds, but it's the closest comparison I can think of)

It is certainly nice that there is now middleware that abstracts the underlying software that controls the hardware, for example, or that authentication and authorization are more uncoupled. But this is really almost the opposite of what systemd does.

Although I'm speaking with my sysadmin hat (I have a few hats). I have a lot of software deployed/managed through Ansible (from node/ruby/python apps to proprietary apps). They might not provide a unit file, so I have to write my own (and I might send it upstream).

The main pain point I encountered regularly, was making sure that the process starts at the right time, has proper stderr logging and monitoring. I rarely bump into kernel or library problems (but that's just me, I'm not denying the problem). I understand what you mean though, systemd is just one of the base components. It doesn't fix everything, but it helps.

On "write once": I feel bad for people who have to read the shell scripts I've written. I think they're good and I'm a fan of keeping it simple, but my scripts don't come with a manual. Any junior dev can understand my unit files (tangential: that's also why I like Ansible/Puppet/etc).

I didn't write upstart units for that reason. I now write systemd units and it's wonderful.