[Mave83]

SystemD took away the pain. You no longer have to think and reinvent the demonize, logging and so on. Just just start what ever you want in a while(1) loop and write to stdout and stderr. No log rotate nightmare, etc.

This makes daemons easier to debug, as they run just in foreground so that you can start them from the cli to thinker with them.

SystemD is highly discussed and some love and some hate it. But such improvements are unmatched and extremely helpful.

[simoncion]

OpenRC, daemontools, and many other service managers provide daemonizing wrappers, and all substantially predate systemd.

The Systemd Cabal are far from the first to have noticed and attempted to resolve most of the problems they tackled... they do have the most effective "developer relations" team of all of the projects in this space, though.

(I do continue to love their old "It's so much better than System V Init!" talking point... as well as their "You'll never have to write a shell script to start or manage a service again! Declarative, INI-formatted Unit Files For Everyone!" one.)

[WesolyKubeczek]

The systemd cabal one-upped all other efforts that pre-dated them by leveraging cgroups such that what rlimits your services run with is dictated by the unit file alone, and not by whatever your user session had when you issued the start or restart command.

[Izkata]

And I think "daemonize" might have been the first? One of the earliest at least, it turns a single process into daemon but doesn't have an overall system command to handle them.