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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I first upgraded a system to a version using it. This was probably a RHEL 6 -> 7 update back in 2014 or so.

It made so many common things I had to do so as a sysadmin super straightforward.

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Same, that was my first experience as well. It was a breath of fresh air in many ways, and after my initial learning of the new syntax, I quickly became a convert.

That said, I have had some concerns over the years about the growing scope of systemd. I think history has shown my concerns were overblown, though I think it is definitely possible and even likely that people were affected by those arguments and maybe moderated the ambitions a little bit. That could be for better or worse, I don't know, but I do think it was a factor

I think the biggest problem with systemd is that they named the main init service manager systemd and also named the organization systemd! It'd be like if GNU named their initrd "GNU". Their other tools just have systemd prepended, e.g. systemd-journald, much like GNU Make or GNU libc (glibc) or similar. The "scope creep" issue doesn't get complained about for GNU because it's clear they're an organization making a bunch of tools for different purposes. Systemd-the-organization is the same, but the naming makes it unclear that many of these tools are not depended on by systemd-the-init-system.

And some things got super hard to do, e.g. sequence. I guess it is sorted now, but either way, I wouldn't want to go back.

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