Also I care about being able to use my computer and for the first in 15 years a systemd update caused my computer to needlessly dropping into systemd emergency mode at boot and this emergency mode being broken I was effectively locked out of my computer because an optional external usb drive that was defined in fstab with no issue for a couple years now required a nofail option. Now consider that this computer is located in a remote location 1000 km away from where I live.
To me systemd already caused way more very real problems I do care a great deal about than it has solved reducing boot time by a few seconds is not something I care that much about.
It would be a step backwards: it is simpler, and does less stuff, so booting would be slower and some features are missing.
My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me.
Proof:
http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png
Yes that's a memcached uptime on a host that has had 10,185,367,932 cache hits...
Also there are some peculiarities in the way the LSB init script compatibility is implemented in systemd: it tries to be 'smart' and remember their state. So you start an init script, and it failed for some reason / perhaps even exited with an error code, perhaps you are still developing that init script. Now fixing the problem and running the init script / systemctl start doesn't even try to run the script because it thinks it has run it yet. You first have to tell it to stop it (which fails), and only then you can run it again.
With FreeBSD, my impression is that manual shell scripting is still the norm. Integrating RCTL (FreeBSD's resource-limiting facility) with service management basically consists of manually writing in a bunch of imperative calls to RCTL into scripts. There's no way to configure services with limits declaratively, ensure the right thing happens when services are started/stopped, etc., precisely because there's no integration between the RCTL facility and the process-management or init facilities. Or at least I haven't found a way. The closest is that if you need such integration only for jails, you do have the option of third-party "monolithic" management systems, such as CBSD.
I will also add that managing disparate platforms is never a reality from experience. There are perhaps two core platforms at a company and they are migrated together in blocks, all together. For us, we have a couple of legacy Ubuntu machines that are being canned this month. Everything else is Windows 2012 R2 and FreeBSD 10.
The "systemd way" is to provide a monolithic abstraction over many things with a DBus API. It's the equivalent of adding WMI and a registry to a Unix platform i.e. it's against the fundamental tenets of the operating system. Having managed windows systems for years, this is really not something I want to see. Time will tell, but if I'm not right about that then I'll eat all three of my hats.
And yes I have experience with systemd as well through evaluation of RHEL7. Within two hours, I'd hit a wall with timedatectl enabling NTP on the machine. The steps to debug the mess were horrible and the issue eventually just spontaneously disappeared.
That's reminiscent of the stateful nature of windows which brings back many years of pain in the 1990's and 00's for me.
Isn't there a bunch of fine print that goes along with that?
>Alpine Linux
How? The installer doesn't even work.