Surely those are services in a very classical sense: Processes that provide a service that other apps need, and which need to go up, down or be reconfigured dyn

Surely those are services in a very classical sense: Processes that provide a service that other apps need, and which need to go up, down or be reconfigured dynamically as a response to other changes in the system (such as networking). So far the way to do that has been pretty ad-hoc, with no formal definition of who has the responsibility for controlling the lifecycle of each component. What systemd brings to the table is a way to formalize those relationships and centralize a lot of common logic related to dependency handling and process control.