Switching to systemd broke _my_ entire Arch _experience_. Before systemd I knew exactly what gets executed, when and why -- which is exact reason why I switched to Arch many years ago. I don't know the same thing after systemd introduction.
As a general point for everyone: Just because it's _also_ an init system doesn't mean it's not allowed to provide the binaries for doing a whole lot of other stuff. :)
Why can't we have an independent organisation that defines a spec for all the relevant APIs and tools for managing a system, and systemd just be one implementation of that spec? Actually, it could be a suite of specs, so people could pick and choose which ones solve their problems, and build alternatives for others.
> [...] by the same people, with the same ideas, and the same gatekeepers [...]
Isn't this exactly what made the Linux Kernel great? A consistent vision.
I agree with you on a few points though, the systemd team should be more cooperative and start being conservative on the API changes. If the API is defined clearly, it shouldn't be hard to make proper replacements for parts of it.
I disagree strongly that there should be an independent Organisation to define that spec, because that would quickly be overrun by bikeshedding and all the other problems stemming from design by comittee. Very often in the Open Source world, specs have been defined by the first people arriving at the scene, so to speak. It all works over dbus, no? That is a fairly simple protocol to implement. I think it's an elegant IPC solution.
Anyway. cheers!
Also try the other options to systemd-analyze, such as "critical-chain", as well as systemd-cgls to get a view of how the currently running processes relate to specific service files.
Together it should give you a view of what gets executed when (to the fraction of a second) and why.
Maybe on Arch this is simpler, on Fedora systemd-analyze dot produces a nightmare that no human mind can navigate.
> -- Try a shell pipeline like 'systemd-analyze dot | dot -Tsvg > systemd.svg'!
> $ ls -al /etc/systemd/system
and look at its contents. It is not that hard. It changed everyone's experience. Some people just hate change. Others deal with it.
While it did make desktop / laptop users experience a little bit more complicated, from what I have read it makes things much easier on the sysadmins who are working with lots of daemons on the servers.
Funny thing. For me systemd has turned that around. I had no idea what was going on in my system, but systemd allows me to easily visualize it, control it and optimize it.
systemd may not be the ultimate init system which all Unix/Linux versions will end up using, but I have no doubt a future init-systems will take a queue from all these things which systemd has done well.
