gimme open-rc or gimme death
actually, sysv was fine too
open-rc solves the parallel-startup desire for people who want a faster boot and doesn't hide logs in binary formats which can only be interrogated with specialised tools - my primary reason for leaving Debian-based systems that I'd used for 16 years was having systemd forced on me and trying to deal with how to read good old system logging, not to mention 5-minute shutdown times, slower boot on the same machine than with Ubuntu's upstart or with open-rc.
> not to mention 5-minute shutdown times
5 minutes? Try total hang on shutdown, and often not starting up. That was my systemd experience. I traced it down to a NFS mount that no amount of tinkering would mount reliably pn boot. Granted that was several years ago, but soured me on systemd.
Fork/exec is the lightweight process inheriting of open i/o and memory state with copy-on-write which made Unix a joy to work with. It's a delightful mapping of kernel and userspace into complex inherited tree of processes sharing that origin state (or not. You can close it all down, change things.)
systemd is a complex mega binary which parses control files and subsumes several functions. It's big. It's not small like init. It's not fork/exec simple it forks control processes and monitors children and does a lot of work some daemons did themselves (getty, inetd) but others didn't do. And you get to monitor things. It's not unlike launchctl on OSX or other platforms. And after all /etc/rc is now 5 or more/etc/rcX.d/ complex substates of states to look for scripts, SAT solver complex dependency stuff between semi arcane shellscripts... blah.
PRO: everything is now much more consistent
CON: greybeards like me hate it (beardless btw but meh) because it's complex