Systemd has had timers since 2012: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/36697dc0199e25f09b...
So if timers were gonna replace cron I'd imagine it'd have happened already. That said, those Canonical folks are pretty crazy, so who knows.
Sudo getting replaced by doas may not be the worst thing.
Many parts of systemd were available for long time but fortunately were not used in distros. And then out of the blue Canonical decided that socket activation for sshd is the way.
Yes. Systemd timers are an order of magnitude better for the average distro maintainer and the average user than the various ways of invoking and running cron.
cron worked just fine and seemingly was perfect for the job for decades and dozens of operating systems.
What happened?
It didn’t and wasn’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41578676
See the last point.
Got it. One man's Unix philosophy is another man's "rag-tag of tools".
And we're back at it: systemd seemingly has plans to eliminate cron. I was not impressed when I have been pulling my hair out on why certain jobs in Ubuntu still run despite being removed from cron files. Turns out, systemd now has 'timers'.
So, mark my words: a few Ubuntu releases down the line, cron will become an optional package and after a couple more it won't even be available.
Up next: sudo.