> It is inflexible and clunky, monolithic and proprietary, binary and difficult. Everything has to be made to work with it, not vice versa. It doesn't follow any of the old conventions that made it simple to combine one tool with another.

Could you share a few specific examples? That hasn't been the case at all for me. I have worked with systemd and have had the opposite experience. I simply write textual config files describing how to launch the service, which can be done in a variety of ways. Could you share more about how you tried to use systemd?

I'd encourage you to read Russ Allbery's analysis of systemd [2], which includes a description of his experience converting one of his packages to use systemd. He remarks on the well-done integration and its compatibility:

* Integrated daemon status. This one caught me by surprise, since the
systemd journal was functionality that I expected to dislike. But I was
surprised at how well-implemented it is, and systemctl status blew me
away. I think any systems administrator who has tried to debug a
running service will be immediately struck by the differences between
upstart:

lbcd start/running, process 32294

and systemd:

lbcd.service - responder for load balancing
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/lbcd.service; enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sun 2013-12-29 13:01:24 PST; 1h 11min ago
Docs: man:lbcd(8)
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/lbcd/
Main PID: 25290 (lbcd)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/lbcd.service
└─25290 /usr/sbin/lbcd -f -l

Dec 29 13:01:24 wanderer systemd[1]: Starting responder for load balancing...
Dec 29 13:01:24 wanderer systemd[1]: Started responder for load balancing.
Dec 29 13:01:24 wanderer lbcd[25290]: ready to accept requests
Dec 29 13:01:43 wanderer lbcd[25290]: request from ::1 (version 3)

Both are clearly superior to sysvinit, which bails on the problem
entirely and forces reimplementation in every init script, but the
systemd approach takes this to another level. And this is not an easy
change for upstart. While some more data could be added, like the
command line taken from ps, the most useful addition in systemd is the
log summary. And that relies on the journal, which is a fundamental
design decision of systemd.

And yes, all of those log messages are also in the syslog files where
one would expect to find them. And systemd can also capture standard
output and standard error from daemons and drop that in the journal and
from there into syslog, which makes it much easier to uncover daemon
startup problems that resulted in complaints to standard error instead
of syslog. This cannot even be easily replaced with something that
might parse the syslog files, even given output forwarding to syslog
(something upstart currently doesn't have), since the journal will
continue to work properly even if all syslog messages are forwarded off
the host, stored in some other format, or stored in some other file.
systemd is agnostic to the underlying syslog implementation.

I think Russ's passage exhibits the opposite sentiment from the one you wrote. Russ says you can get the benefits of systemctl and journalctl if you want, but you can also use syslog in the old-fashioned way if you want. This has been my experience with systemd as well. I still have a habit of writing "service postfix restart", which still works but is not the systemd-idiomatic way. I don't even have the "correct" way memorized because the old way that I'm used to using works.

So what I'm asking is, have you tried to achieve something with systemd and found that you were forced to do it differently? I'd be curious to learn more about what those cases were. I'm not affiliated with systemd project, but I have a general interest in wanting to see it improve.

(Please note that, barring conventions of some kind that span multiple tools, every tool naturally requires you to do things that tool's own way. If you are holding systemd to the standard that its job should be able to be performed by two different tools, each with the same interface, while supporting advanced features, then you should have other examples of this as well.)

[1] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...

[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2013/12/msg00234.html