I would drop it in a heartbeat if I could. Dealing with servers it's not solving a problem I have, and just introducing the strangest behaviour along the way.

> Dealing with servers it's not solving a problem I have,

For me it's solving the problem of simply and reliably wiring up persistent and resilient services (not shipped with the OS).

I don't know about you, but that's a need I especially have on servers.

When systemd works, it works remarkably well.

>For me it's solving the problem of simply and reliably wiring up persistent and resilient services (not shipped with the OS).

That aspect was already largely solved, and has been for a long time. runit, upstart, daemontools etc.

Daemontools, like a number of djb's tools, manages to really manage to blend an amazing level of "just works" and "ZOMG, I configure this how?!"

I always hated the prevalence of so many tools -- I get sick of having to learn 30 variants of the same stupid thing because none of them seem to excel in every area. One server from recent memory had crap running in sysv, inittab, and with deamontools because not everybody liked the same system and kinda just did what they knew. I'm rather happy that systemd throws all that out.

That's just lousy technical culture. If you can't ensure you've got clean practices on your servers to that degree, you've got bigger problems on your plate.

As if one is always able to influence a lousy technical culture, especially if they just walked through the door...

Indeed, I've deployed it in both embedded linux and server environments and it works quite nicely in both roles.

Agreed, the config files for upstart were so easy to template out and always worked reliably.

I use it on my desktop and laptop today (Archlinux)

Have been using it since it was introduced in Fedora 16 (as I was a fedora guy) and I've never been convinced of its use on a server.

I understand it solves some problems but does so while introducing new and harder to remedy ones. (like tight ABI integration).

I don't mind systemd (ok, I'd criticise it but not nearly hate it as much), but I don't like that it's now the default target which forces me to use it in future.

I'm a Systems Engineer, so I have different needs from servers than Developers I guess, I want things to be easy to debug and diagnose.

I will say that I'm not only accustomed to systemd or sysvinit, I've also used runit at scale, along with SMF on Solaris and openrc.

SMF Beats the pants off systemd, even if it uses XML internally.