Naa. I'm young and generally positive about systemd, but I'd happily admit that the complexity gap is huge. It's practically impossible to explain systemd to anyone not intimately familiar with linux and systems programming without a bunch of handwaving.

This. I can easily believe that systemd is an improvement in many ways for people who have time to understand it (especially in NixOS, as noted by another commenter). But I'm not happy that so many parts of Linux now have such a steep learning curve.

But system init is a hard, complex problem. You can’t create a simple solution for that, since there is an inherent complexity. I prefer systemd over having a bunch of bash scripts trying to do service restart, logging, dependency management and failing at it. You would still get the same complexity but at a different (worse) level.

> But system init is a hard, complex problem. [...] a bunch of bash scripts trying to do service restart, logging, dependency management and failing at it.

Playing devil's advocate: system init by itself is easy, just have a single script starting each daemon in sequence, like it was done in the distant past (IIRC, "init" started both the getty for each terminal, and ran a single startup script). It's the "service restart, logging, dependency management" part that's complicated. And unfortunately, since nowadays devices are often hot-pluggable, you can't really escape from the "dependency management" part.

Dependency management is not only due to hot-pluggability, but inherent dependencies between different services. This is the same problem as with package managers and I would not necessarily say it is easy.

> But system init is a hard, complex problem.

It's not. Read the shell scripts that openbsd uses to init. Simple, straightforward, easy to understand.

The complexity is buried in the huge work the OpenBSD devs make to keep the kernel and the base system small, elegant and consistent.

I read your comment more as a tribute to the excellent work of the OpenBSD team than a denial of the thesis of the complexity of the init process.

> The complexity is buried in the huge work the OpenBSD devs make to keep the kernel and the base system small, elegant and consistent.

>> You can’t create a simple solution for that, since there is an inherent complexity.

They didn't bury the complexity, they removed it. And I agree, that's hard to do. It'd be nice if the systemd folks put in the same effort to remove the complexity from their system.

As a DevOps, having to know a bunch of Linux and system programming is a job requirement. In the old days Unix system admins were very familiar with this also.