CentOS 7 potential release (opens in new tab)

True, the grub2 config is horrible.

No more easy to understand /etc/init.d

It's a bit more complicated, but not too bad:

Instead of "/etc/init.d/thing restart" you type "systemctl restart thing"

Instead of chkconfig --list, you type "systemctl list-dependencies"

Writing the equivalent script with systemd is much cleaner with less hacks, particularly for launching as different users and doing locking.

No more text log files for system log (journalctl instead)

By default. It's fine once you get the hang of the new syntax:

journalctl --since=today --follow

Watch out for default XFS filesystem instead of EXT4 because it is slower in real world use for databases, etc.

Depends on the workload. Speed is only one part of it. For some benchmarks by phoronix see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_315...

Oh, that's beautiful. And if you want to get s..t done, you can't even quickly search the manpage, because for religious reasons, GNU projects use that weird (and traditionally utterly verbose) info system. But hey, GNU is for GNU's Not Unix, so we shouldn't be too surprised ...

It's not like I didn't appreciate what the GNU project has done for the free software world, but it's so annoying that they seem to be focused more on religious matters than on writing good (well-documented, easy-to-configure, non-bloated) software.

I'm doing more and more server stuff with the BSDs, simply because the docs are so well-written and if I want to understand some part of the system, it doesn't feel like there are numerous layers of abstractions hiding away the interesting parts from me.

Why choose it as the default filesystem in an enterprise-oriented distro?

Does any of that really improve my day?

Nope. In fact most of it makes it worse and adds friction. More cogs turning in different directions.

Will keep our devops stuff on CentOS 6.5 for at least another 4 years...

CentOS 6 had Upstart, right? Which is likely to become deprecated due to the fact that Ubuntu is also moving to systemd.

Sure, Red Hat are the ones pushing systemd, but some disruptive change away from Upstart was inevitable.

Systemd has a few nice features that I (as a systems admin of thousands of servers) really like such as:

    - simple "init script" like upstart, so magical or crappy shell scripts from vendors are a thing of the past. A standardized unit file

    - Ulimit support natively as part of the format

    - Limiting via memory/disk/cpu cgroups to contain buggy apps (hello mysql!)

    - Process restarting so tools like supervisord, monit, runit, etc are no longer necessary

    - It can _always_ stop an errant daemon as it uses control groups to do so, sysv init was sometimes buggy in this regard

    - Private /tmp (via filesystem namespaces), limiting system calls a service can run, tcp wrappers, read only parts of the filesystem (like /etc) are all trivial to add to any legacy service such as bind or sendmail and a supported part of the systemd unit file definition.

As an _actual_ user who uses RHEL/Debian/etc on bare metal at scale, I really see nothing but awesome in RHEL7. It is just like I see awesome in Fedora 20 or in the latest Ubuntu/Debian. The Linux ecosystem has massively grown. Now we have a serious engineering company putting a lot of resources into supporting a new operating system. I'd love to see some of the technical reasons you have the opinion you do.