As an application developer and hobby sysadmin, systemd is a godsend over the misconfigured and broken stuff distributions have delivered for years.
systemd has made my work a lot more effective, and I’ve gained massive productivity.
And that is roughly the size of the problem. If you're an application developer or a hobby sysadmin then probably systemd is good for you, but if you're an experienced sysadmin it spells 'fixed what wasn't broken' and it re-introduces many issues that were already thought about, taken care of and laid to rest.
Note the rise of "devops" that is basically about getting a straight line from devs to management so devs can sideline ops and their naysaying of the latest shinies devs wnats to sprinkle the projects with.
Another thing is that there is less and less interest in maintenance, because maintenance is not fun. The GNU generation i slowly leaving, and is being replaced with the "fun" generation that is hell bent on rewriting working, if crufty, systems using the latest language fads over a caffeine fueled weekend...
As an experienced sysadmin that's a really sweeping claim to toss out without details or supporting evidence — the latter being especially important given the amount of hyperbole bandied about.
The next largest SysV replacement was Upstart, which solved many problems but had curious oversights (e.g. restart with a delay or backoff, needing many releases before adding stdout/ stderr logging or launching as a user other than root), and SMF/launchd which weren't compelling enough to overcome their respective platforms’ drawbacks. Yes, you can install alternate init systems or run things under something like supervisord but supporting that was quite tedious compared to a solid standard init.
As a software developer, being able to target one init system which has all of the features I need and no real drawbacks is similarly a very nice change from the past needing to support variants for each major Linux distribution while wishing they'd hit feature-parity with Windows NT 3.1 (1993!).
The fact that every major Linux distribution has adopted systemd suggests that whatever reintroduced issues aren't gross exaggerations aren't as important as claimed; similarly, the features commonly dismissed as unnecessary inevitably turn out to be useful to part of the larger Linux community even if a particular detractor doesn't share those needs.
We need a system that people can install at home, and that never needs someone to configure or maintain it.
We need a system that people can throw on a VPS, and that needs no maintenance or configuration.
We need a system that a company can deploy over clusters of tenthousands of systems, and just works.
If you need a human to manually configure this stuff, it’s broken. The only situation where systemd isn’t useful is when you’re a small company, but large enough to be able to afford an ops guy for every issue there is. Generally, if you need ops to configure the base OS, you’re doing stuff wrong.
This whole point about devops and system is about automating sysadmins away, and this is a very necessary and worthy step.
