It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.
I think that’s exactly it for most people. The socket, mount, timer unit files; the path/socket activations; the After=, Wants=, Requires= dependency graph, and the overall architecture as a more unified ‘event’ manager are what feels really different than most everything else in the Linux world.
That coupled with the ini-style VerboseConfigurationNamesForThatOneThing and the binary journals made me choose a non-systemd distro for personal use - where I can tinker around and it all feels nice and unix-y. On the other hand I am really thankful to have systemd in the server space and for professional work.
I’m not great at any init things, but systemd has made my home server stuff relatively seamless. I have two NASs that I mount, and my server starts up WAY faster than both of them, and I (stupidly) have one mount within the other. So I set requirements that nasB doesn’t mount until nasA has, then docker doesn’t start until after nasB is mounted. Works way better than going in after 5 minutes and remounting and restarting.
Of course, I did just double my previous storage on A, so I could migrate all of Bs stuff back. But that would require a small amount of effort.
I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I’m not sure that’s the ini style’s fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.
I think that’s exactly it for most people. The socket, mount, timer unit files; the path/socket activations; the
After=,Wants=,Requires=dependency graph, and the overall architecture as a more unified ‘event’ manager are what feels really different than most everything else in the Linux world.That coupled with the ini-style VerboseConfigurationNamesForThatOneThing and the binary journals made me choose a non-systemd distro for personal use - where I can tinker around and it all feels nice and unix-y. On the other hand I am really thankful to have systemd in the server space and for professional work.
I’m not great at any init things, but systemd has made my home server stuff relatively seamless. I have two NASs that I mount, and my server starts up WAY faster than both of them, and I (stupidly) have one mount within the other. So I set requirements that nasB doesn’t mount until nasA has, then docker doesn’t start until after nasB is mounted. Works way better than going in after 5 minutes and remounting and restarting.
Of course, I did just double my previous storage on A, so I could migrate all of Bs stuff back. But that would require a small amount of effort.
I’ve started doing podman quadlets recently, and the ini config style is ugly as hell compared to yaml (even lol) in docker compose.
I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I’m not sure that’s the ini style’s fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.