Systemd certainly seems to divide opinions. This “new” init system, which also seeks to be a daemon and a central building block of the Linux today is without a doubt both good and a bad thing.

The good thing about systemd is that it does provide some much needed new functions and keeps things well within “the one single cover”. However, since systemd tries to be very versatile its design also tends to evolve more complex every time a new version gets done. Complexity by itself is not a problem when things do not break and everything goes well. The reality of computer world is however that things do, in general, break sooner or later and in this regard systemd is not perfect. For example: My more powerful computer was able to boot Debian Jessie easily but my Intel Atom build greeted me with a message saying that Systemd malfunctioned – and nothing ended up working. From the previous example it is easy to see that systemd (like all programs) do get bugs which can really ruin the user’s experience. Continue reading →