> that there is nothing there that helps me debug what is going on That's not really true. Journald is your friend. I find many of the complaints about systemd

> that there is nothing there that helps me debug what is going on That's not really true. Journald is your friend. I find many of the complaints about systemd stem from unfamiliarity with its tools. The Arch Wiki gives a really nice overview of the most common usage scenarios[1] & [2], that's worth investing some time into. Also [3] is your friend. Just refusing to put any time into learning systemd and then complaining about it, is one approach, but not a particularly productive one. In your case, I'd try something like `systemd-analyze verify default.target` and go from there. Additionally, look into /etc/system.d/system.conf, specifically adjusting the Timeout values to a less conservative value. 1 - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd 2 - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Journal#Filtering_output https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Journal#Filteri... 3 - https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-analyze.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-ana...