Branding perhaps. If 50 tools had been released, called "newInit", "newDns", "newNTP" etc, with each tool succeeding or failing (upstart) on it's own merits, th

Branding perhaps. If 50 tools had been released, called "newInit", "newDns", "newNTP" etc, with each tool succeeding or failing (upstart) on it's own merits, that would be one thing. There is a perception that systemd has taken over the entire system as a cancer - replacing things that have worked for decades just because it's cool. One annoyance I get is this: I've just taken an Ubuntu 1604 server running apache and b0rked the config file. $ sudo systemctl restart apache2.service Job for apache2.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status apache2.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details. $ That's crazy. "Something broke, now go look here or there for why". Compare under an old ubuntu 1404 machine I have lying around $ sudo service apache2 reload * Reloading web server apache2 * The apache2 configtest failed. Not doing anything. Output of config test was: AH00526: Syntax error on line 1 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/sd.conf: Invalid command 'blah', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration Action 'configtest' failed. The Apache error log may have more information. That is so much more helpful. You run the first and it outputs the last few lines of log. Why not output that when I call restart in the first place? Another one is taking over DNS from resolv.conf. Muscle memory from years of "cat /etc/resolv.conf" (with a tab somewhere in the middle) has been replaced with the ungainly "systemd-resolve --status". Now all of this is great if you're running servers as cattle - if you have thousands of machines doing web-scale stuff you don't want to see what's happening on a single machine, your layers of automation abstract it all away, your system can cope with machines going down, you probably don't even have an ssh account. If you are looking after individual machines though, systemd came in and turned everything upside down to presumably make things easier for cattle owners.