> as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable. This isn't written for laymen, who would obviously never be reading about what SystemD is

> as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable. This isn't written for laymen, who would obviously never be reading about what SystemD is. It's written for specialists who do engineering work on or with Linux, and who actually need to know the technical details of their tools. And anyway, I suspect plenty of laymen, and highly trained professionals in other fields like law, medicine, and philosophy among others, would have no trouble understanding what "idempotent" is. It's not inscrutable at all, but rather is one of the easiest concepts in CS and software engineering to understand.