I have a problem with how service files are good, except when you don't get them right on the first try and it's difficult to debug (unless I've missed somethin

I have a problem with how service files are good, except when you don't get them right on the first try and it's difficult to debug (unless I've missed something obvious). More generally, I find that systemd is difficult to observe and thus debug. To debug an ancient init.d script, you'd just run it with "sh -x" rather that sh, and you would have a trace of what the script is doing. If your service file is a tad more complicated, then you quickly discover that there's a scripting language masquerading behind key/value entries. I have a hard time wrapping my head around dbus being the core component used for coordination among systemd components. dbus wasn't built for this use case, and having PID1 depend on a well behaved dbus for proper system operation sounds insane. systemd adds a lot of features, which means additional complexity. My understanding so far is that the tooling is not there yet to manage this complexity. Another gripe I have with systemd is that it does parallel service start introduces non determinism at boot. Which means your setup could work very well most of time, but fail miserably 1 time out of 10. Not exactly what you'd want if you are rebooting a remote server for example. s6 [1] init doesn't appear to have this problem. [1] https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ https://skarnet.org/software/s6/