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I just can't get myself worked up over systemd. Every in-principle objection I have to systemd also applies to the Linux kernel itself—but orders of magnitude "worse."

Principles aside, in reality, systemd has been a complete non-issue for me and a massive quality of life improvement for Linux as a desktop operating system.

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That’s kind of where I am. I have yet to run into issues with systemd in practice. I suppose I did run into two but they both came down to old style init scripts that didn’t work right and so systemd couldn’t make sense of them.

Is it not possible to turn off things like systemd’s DNS server, etc? I imagine if you care about such things you should be able to reconfigure your OS to use something else instead.

I run it in practice but I don't trust it enough to run critical services under it (instead I use runit started from systemd) and it does have to much overreach which bit me several times. For instance setting the number of open files and other resource limits. Let's just say I'd rather use runit or even openrc instead.

It is possible to disable stuff like systemd-resolved or systemd-timesyncd but it takes extra work which should be done by installing another package that accomplishes the same task (unbiound, chrony) just like as one MTA replaces another on Debian.

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