It's actually not that bad once you get used to it. It parallizes the startup process, and can be quite a bit quicker than initd. I've gotten to the point that I can create systemd unit files fairly easily, and can get custom processes to work on boot up pretty easily.
> It's actually not that bad once you get used to it. It parallizes the startup process, and can be quite a bit quicker than initd. I've gotten to the point that I can create systemd unit files fairly easily, and can get custom processes to work on boot up pretty easily.
Honestly, I care far less about the "Look how fast it boots!" competition, than about "Look, it did everything in the right order, and it's the same order every time it boots".
The fact that I have to twist its arm -- hard, and with a lot of overhead -- to make it act even somewhat consistently is why I say it's a broken mess. Boot should be a deterministic process by default.
Of course, I say that as a system administrator of a considerable network, not a desktop user who wants his single computer to boot faster than the one his friend has.
Do you know of a good primer on systemd? It's a confusing mess to me. I much prefer the clarity of init scripts.
As for the boot speed, I'm not really concerned about that. It could take half an hour to boot, and I wouldn't care since that only happens 3 times in an average year (if that). I only reboot on kernel upgrades, and do those fairly infrequently. I reboot on kernel upgrades just to make sure nothing got badly bolluxed up. I'd rather know right away rather than have it bite me in the ass later on, and not know what change caused it.