"But we believed that an init system should work the other way around, where you say: this is where I want to go to, and you figure out the rest. Because of tha

"But we believed that an init system should work the other way around, where you say: this is where I want to go to, and you figure out the rest. Because of that design, Upstart was very simple, but it put a lot of complexity on admins and developers, because you actually had to write down all these rules" ...and this is the problem. Pushing this kind of complexity into PID 1 (or however systemd achieves this) is exactly the wrong solution. The init system should not be clever, or contain an "engine that can figure out what the computer is supposed to be doing" as he says later. This really smells of second system syndrome. In reality even with a simple init that pushes complexity to the admins, end users rarely incur the cost. The distribution authors set up init as needed and end users don't need to worry unless they makes changes. Then you get the best of both worlds: easy maintainability and a simple, reliable init system.