systemd has been a net positive for the linux ecosystem. remember when you had to write bash scripts to start, stop, restart services and handle any other signals you want to send it? nowadays it's a unit file (basically just an ini file) away with relatively straightforward API. and you can actually declare startup dependencies and other useful relationships past just "prepend a number signifying when it should run…
> you can actually declare startup dependencies and other useful relationships In theory, yes. In practice, I had a lot of trouble ordering things correctly in non-trivial cases. > it's quite annoying that the armchair linux experts complain about how "lol systemd is so stupid for reinventing the wheel, give me my shell scripts back" I can only speak for myself, but I don't want the abysmal sysvinit scripts back. I j…
"sysvinit" is an ill-defined concept, anyway, as every distribution had their own scripts and tooling around actual services, and sysvinit was generally only responsible for starting getty and launching the distribution's actual service system. How initscripts were created and how you managed them depended significantly on the distribution.
[1]: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/net-vpn/tails...