This isn't about boot time, that is just a nice side effect for desktop users. This is about servers, and better ways to manage the services on them. A service

This isn't about boot time, that is just a nice side effect for desktop users. This is about servers, and better ways to manage the services on them. A service shouldn't need to daemonize itself, and monitor it's own process via shell scripts and PID files. Having infrastructure to run services (as apposed to just starting them), monitor them, and resolve dependencies between them is a huge step forward. (I also don't agree with the handling of socket-based service in systemd, but it's an experiment, and maybe I'm wrong, so its worth a try).