> And you can't have it both ways - is it great because it's a consistent, cohesive system that provides everything you need for a Linux system, or is it great

> And you can't have it both ways - is it great because it's a consistent, cohesive system that provides everything you need for a Linux system, or is it great because it's a modular toolkit that allows you to pick & choose which components to use? You absolutely can have it both way. Systemd is great because it offers a set of tools which are consistent, provide a lot of the functionality you want on a workstation in a cohesive way. It doesn't prevent you from choosing not to use one of the components developed under the project umbrella and uses something different instead. Systemd is modular enough for you to do that. > But I've also had to deal with production servers using systemd-timesyncd and pool.ntp.org that would occasionally have system clocks that were off by ~10 minutes. SNTP was deemed "good enough" Why are you using timesyncd if you need more than SNTP ? Timesyncd is not shipped by default with the systemd init system. It is not even installed by default on RHEL. Nothing prevents you from using a different NTP client with the systemd init system. > If I use systemd as a service manager, why does that also imply I'm making "default" choices for boot loader, (S)NTP service, network manager, and container manager? It does not imply that at all. You absolutely do not have to use the boot loader, timesyncd, networkd and nspawn with systemd. They are not even installed by default on some distributions. They are not coupled to the service manager.