Story

I'm not a big fan of systemd, but I disagree with the idea that sysvinit didn't need replacement.

It required a large amount of boilerplate in the service start/stop script, which was different between distros, making it a lot of work to provide a decent start/stop script for your daemon. The hard work of distro maintainers hid this nuisance from most end users though.

Ordering the service startup sequence by manually assigning priorities to them (S80myservice) instead of using dependencies is a terrible hack. It also prevents services from being started in parallel, which is a pity on today's multi-core systems. It's like building your code using a shell script instead of a Makefile.

There is no consistency in how services are started: inittab can respawn, init.d scripts can query the service status (on some distros!), (x)inetd can start services on demand, but all have different configurations.

I have some doubts systemd is the right solution to these problems, but at least there is movement now. In my opinion, the solution would be to improve systemd or replace it with something better, not going back to sysvinit.