Not everybody has systemd. The BSDs don't (iirc), and for example we are stuck with some Debian Wheezy host at $work, which don't come with systemd either. Als

Not everybody has systemd. The BSDs don't (iirc), and for example we are stuck with some Debian Wheezy host at $work, which don't come with systemd either. Also, lots of operators have decades of experience with cron, and don't want to give up on that easily. [Update] After reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers I see two more reasons * You don't have to write a service file to use cron jobs, which makes ad-hoc tasks much easier * Sending mails is the default for cron, which requires extra work with systemd.