Hi all, to start with Douglas Adams: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this already happened." I have this sometimes in my mind if I look at Linux related development. Especially in the area of desktops, btw. Everybody knows that Unix is around for so long because it suffers the "good enough" syndrome. What are the killer features that make systemd so much appealing to change? "Making a boot a bit faster" isn't good enough for such an intrusive change, I would think. What else does it do better? Why do I need a journald (mandatory) if I have already a bunch of syslog services developed over many years? Are there binary logs which are hard to read if things go really really wrong? (That really would be a show stopper for me.) What exactly is the network demon used for? Does it work nicely with approaches as OS virtualisation (e.g. Linux containers with own network stack) I have simply problems to understand motivation and design. It seems to be more than just init. Which "other parts" will it take over? Does it "eat into he kernel" finally and makes Linux a microkernel? Or does it replace traditional userland applications (e.g. syslog) and makes the systemd equivalents mandatory even sometimes unintended? (Let's say: the modern Linux desktop is Gnome, Gnome packages require systemd, systemd includes journald)? BTW: Making parts of a system less exchangeable does not only hurts porting, it creates "single point of failures" if there is a problem. Think of bash recently. You cannot replace it if your scripts have a lot of "bashisms" in it. If you do not have a fix you are stuffed. If FreeBSDs sh is vulnerable I can simply replace it with bash (e.g.) If rsyslogd is vulnerable and there is no fix: Just replace it with syslogd. If systemd requires journald and there is an issue: good luck! Not having a choice makes a system less modular and flexible. This looks very much "Un-Unix-like" to me. Obviously Solaris SMF is there for a while. Being a commercial product it just arrived and was not discussed widely in public. Admins looked, were confused and .. just went on with it. For me it is between "A bit annoying" and "This works quite well"! I did not do too much "cool stuff" to appreciate it. So I do not have a definite well-informed opinion about it. I used Ubuntu for a few years with upstart and was mildly annoyed. But I did not explore it too much. It was just my desktop and it's mostly web browser and terminal multiplexer. No point in getting religious about it. It is a different story if I have to deploy and administrate Unix/Linux servers. To be honest, if I can I choose FreeBSD. If I need commercial support it more or less dictates Red Hat so Debian will not be my choice. Well, maybe I "find" somewhere Debian servers to look after. But it dd not happen to me for more than ten years now I think. But it is more or less likely that I have to deal with systemd in the future, Debian or Red Hat. What are the shortcomings of the existing GNU/Linux framework so it has to be replaced by systemd? I see a lot of cons (Maybe some only because I am not well-informed? Please correct me!) and not many pros. Regards Peter