Systemd (along with the various add-on services that come with it on most major distros) meddles with and tends to break critical functionality quite often, except on boring systems where the needs being served happen to be handled well by systemd’s happy path(s).

If the computers you maintain fit Lennart Poettering’s idea of how to do things, then you might never notice a problem. On the other hand, if you’re responsible for systems with unusual or complex configurations, or have need of the flexibility that makes unix so very useful in the first place, then you might very well discover that systemd is a pushy, invasive, poorly considered, buggy, and in some ways just pain broken collection of software, maintained with a level of arrogance and carelessness not often matched in the unix community, and you might rightly come to despise working with it.

Sadly, my experience has been the latter. In the years since the systemd suite was adopted by Debian distros, I have been burned more times by it and spent more weeks of my life troubleshooting it than I can count any more. Because of this, I have come to resent systemd. And I know I’m not alone in this.

So, dear readers, when you see people complaining about systemd, please try not to be like the zealots out there who routinely cry “luddite” and demand proof when they encounter folks who dislike it. Try instead to remember that one size does not fit all, that some of systemd’s detractors are very skilled and reasonable people who happen to run systems that are necessarily different from your own, and have encountered problems that you have not. It has been over a decade. Some of us are tired of it, and tired of talking about it.