The systemd people themselves state them to be "obsolete". * https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/runlevel.html https://freedesktop.org/software/system

The systemd people themselves state them to be "obsolete". * https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/runlevel.html https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/runlevel.html * https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/telinit.html https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/telinit.html These things do not actually exist in systemd at all, outwith a few compatibility shims. And the same can be said of FreeBSD, too. They don't actually exist in FreeBSD, or indeed any BSD, at all, outwith compatibility shims such as FreeBSD's init command. (The FreeBSD init compatibility shim really is not recognizing the command-line arguments as runlevels in any real sense, especially since it does not recognize the numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5; the very numbers for which the run part of runlevel is appropriate.) Note that the systemd compatibility shim completely ignores the actual "runlevel0.target" targets; that there is no "init table" of runlevel stuff; and that the separate run levels in /etc/rc[234].d are all combined into one by systemd's backwards compatibility service unit generator. This stuff genuinely does not exist in systemd. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/196014/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/196014/5132 * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/233581/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/233581/5132 * http://jdebp.eu./FGA/inittab-is-history.html http://jdebp.eu./FGA/inittab-is-history.html Arch Linux users don't even get the compatibility shims. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/389289/ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/389289/