Concrete example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 (I am the asker of that question). This is a real

Concrete example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 (I am the asker of that question). This is a really weird thing to happen, and not really easy to debug, much less fix. Look at the diff that fixed the bug for an example. No way I could have figured that out on my own without a significant investment in time. With runit, everything is pretty straightforward. Not saying I can figure out every last bug, but I can at least mostly understand what's going on if I spend a wee bit of time on it. Same with Free/NetBSD's rc system, and OpenBSD's rc system. Here, it's really hard to even figure out if this is the expected behaviour or not, as all this logic is fairly complex. I remember watching a talk Linus did about Linux around 2000. One of the reasons he likes Unix is that (paraphrased, as I didn't look up the original) "everything is understandable; you don't understand all of the system, but if you want or need to, you can go in there and understand it and hack on it". Now, that may have been true for the 2000 Linux ecosystem, but for the 2018 system ... yeah, not always. For better or worse, Linux has kind of lost this property to some degree. There are trade-offs here of course (Linux has also gained some stuff), but for me personally, I much prefer the "understandable" and "hackable" Unix systems. I think Void Linux is a good example of that (OpenBSD is another). Oh, and here's another example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/184338/33645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/184338/33645 The systemd error message for this unexpected situation was worthless (see my self-accepted answer). It was a simple problem, but took me quite some time to figure out.