Systemd is anything but simple. And the past definitely wasn't easy. You seem to have the terms backward. For the end user, yes, it's a polished experience that

Systemd is anything but simple. And the past definitely wasn't easy. You seem to have the terms backward. For the end user, yes, it's a polished experience that you mostly don't have to mess with, and the parts of it you're most likely to interact with are, well, fine. Not great, but fine. > operable understandable system Every system is understandable, it's just a question of how much work you have to put into understanding it. Good design reduces the amount of this effort needed. Many many systemd components simply aren't well-designed. But they all interop with each other so there's no way to slowly wean a system off of systemd. Trust me I tried. I don't want to understand systemd. It feels like being at work. Good on you for putting in the effort. I should be able to use software I like and want to use. Maybe even hand-write some replacements, like I'm doing with my shell. Systemd doesn't get in my way there, thankfully, it's been awhile so I don't have specifics off the top of my head for the last time I tried removing a few systemd components only to find hard dependencies on each other. This is not how Linux needs to be. I agree the old ways sucked. I don't want to go back to them either. But neither do I want to be locked into the big ugly mess that systemd turned into. I want clean, modern, well-designed components that are independent of each other. Systemd makes me feel like I'm on a Mac.