> The big reason was that I needed a distribution that did not change so frequently Yeah, this is a perfectly valid reason and also why I tend not to use Arch

> The big reason was that I needed a distribution that did not change so frequently Yeah, this is a perfectly valid reason and also why I tend not to use Arch on servers (as much as I would like to otherwise, though...). Both have their use cases, and I love Arch for desktops, but it's not a particularly great match for situations where rapid, near-constant change is unwarranted, unnecessary, or problematic. Arch is also a distro that requires a fair amount of love and care--failure to do so, as a friend of mine learned last year when I had to help him update a year old install, can result in an upgrade path that's nearly impossible. Fortunately, ARM was still up at the time. There certainly is something to be said for stable distros with a strict upgrade path. > I wonder if the advantages could have been accomplished without the binary file format. I don't know. I'll be honest: I can't think of a time when I've actually made use of the filtering features of journalctl and systemd's binary format. Nearly all circumstances that have required me to examine the log are usually done by observing the last few entries or manual searches. To that extent, I'd agree that it bears a certain sense of overkill. That said, it is still possible to feed syslog-ng entries from systemd. So I can't think of a reason to fret much over specific tooling or the likes that expects text logs. IMO, the udev/systemd relationship, repo, etc. is probably a much more valid complaint, especially for distributions that aren't planning on using systemd in the near future as it likely has some impact on developer/maintainer workload. Although from a sysadmin perspective, the benefits of systemd are very real and material, at least in my experience. Service introspection could probably use some work to simplify, so that's another complaint. I can never remember the commands half the time. ;)