The problems with journalctl are usability ones, which doesn't make them any less of a problem, but doesn't point to an underlying technical failure either.

The problems with systemd are basically stated as "a Fedora upgrade causes systemd to go bad." Is this a systemd problem or a Fedora problem?

[0] With the number of different packages in a modern Linux, I don't expect everything in a distributions repository to work perfectly, but core stuff (like the stuff that gets you from a cold boot to a login prompt, etc) should be rock solid.

... what kind of nonsense is that? Almost every library supports static linking to a basic degree at least. Heck, I statically link giant things like Qt and Boost every day at work.

I mean, you could, but now your staticly linked binary still depends on other dlsym'd code. So whats the point?

(Not trying to make an argument that this is good or bad behaviour)

* See for instance https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=915912#c18

Of course, this may not even solve the root cause of the problem this article talks about. It would make PID 1 a little more resillient though.

Well, that is a surprise to me. And something of a concern.

The points discussed here are serious, should be filed as bug reports, and should be acted on by the developers. But the article also just sounds like systemd bashing, software has bugs and poor thought out solutions - which can be fixed or improved - it's just code.

I could probably have written a similar article about many, many Fedora (and Debian) upgrades over the course of a decade or so about core components such as distro upgrades making the init system crashing, failing to start services, glibc upgrades screwing up servers, grub upgrades calling for a 2 hour car drive to fix and so on. But I didn't, I either filed a bug report, fixed the code, or was just too plain busy getting things back to working.