Not really. systemd uses targets (see the link to the Arch wiki from rhblake, above [1]) instead which are arguably more flexible. Although systemd understands

Not really. systemd uses targets (see the link to the Arch wiki from rhblake, above [1]) instead which are arguably more flexible. Although systemd understands runlevels with the runlevel.target, most services will tend to use multi-user.target or graphical.target. Although you can also create custom targets for various purposes. I suspect* the runlevel targets are probably used by and intended for systemd's initscript/sysvinit compatibility layer to ease porting. I use Arch, so I can't comment specifically on this matter since most sysvinit compatibility cruft (outside init/halt/reboot/poweroff) has long been removed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785448