You can ofcourse achieve all these things in your init scripts which are unique in their way and not uniform at all, just to give credit where credit is due. But systemd makes it practical to use our beloved kernel and it's features in an uniform and standard way... :)
I started my Linux journey so late I can't imagine living without systemd, the few systems I've encountered without systemd are such a major PITA to use.
I recently discovered "unshare" which I could use to remount entire /nix RW for some hardlinking shenanigans without affecting other processes.
systemd is so good, warty UX when interacting with it but the alternative is honestly Windows in my case.
Aside, I'm quite surprise that systemd won out, given all the hate for so many years. You got nearly every forum and HN thread that even tangently mention systemd, flooded with people proclaiming systemd to be the spawn of the devil "forced down their throat". At the same time I noticed that a lot of regular Linux users (like developers that just want to deploy stuff) seemed to like systemd unit files. I guess all those complainers, however vocal, were neither the majority, nor the people who actually maintained distributions.
This feeling is particular striking for me, because I once worked on a Linux project with the aim of improving packaging and software distribution. We also got a lot of hate, mainly for not being .deb or.rpm, and it looked to me as if the hate was a large reason for the failure of the project.
systemd is very complex software. Alternative is very simple software with complex scripting which will reimplement parts of systemd in a buggy way (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). systemd probably is inspired by Windows and other service managers, while old sysv init is just a tiny launcher for script tree.
Just an example of systemd limitation is that systemd does not support musl, so if you want to build a tiny embedded sysroot, you already have some limitations.
lillecarl|6 months ago
I started my Linux journey so late I can't imagine living without systemd, the few systems I've encountered without systemd are such a major PITA to use.
I recently discovered "unshare" which I could use to remount entire /nix RW for some hardlinking shenanigans without affecting other processes.
systemd is so good, warty UX when interacting with it but the alternative is honestly Windows in my case.
FooBarWidget|6 months ago
This feeling is particular striking for me, because I once worked on a Linux project with the aim of improving packaging and software distribution. We also got a lot of hate, mainly for not being .deb or.rpm, and it looked to me as if the hate was a large reason for the failure of the project.
vbezhenar|6 months ago
Just an example of systemd limitation is that systemd does not support musl, so if you want to build a tiny embedded sysroot, you already have some limitations.