Mastering systemd: Securing and sandboxing applications and services
I have to admit, having recently spent some time learning it and updating my Linux skills I really don&#x27;t understand why systemd seems to have provoked so much hate and controversy in the Linux world. So far I really like it. It makes a Linux server feel more like something designed rather than incrementally patched together out of hacky shell scripts written 20 years ago.<p>The unit config files are small and simple. Every line makes sense. Things are coherent - learning how to start a service at bootup means you&#x27;ve partly learned how to configure the new equivalent of cron jobs. The same configuration works at the system and per-user level. You can quickly locate logs. I didn&#x27;t quite like the command line interface at first e.g. why &quot;systemctl&quot; and not &quot;service&quot;, plus I always forget if it&#x27;s the service name in the second or first position. But the basic functionality is all there.<p>I realise Docker is all the rage at the moment but I&#x27;ve found it kind of flaky and complicated. For my own purposes systemd feels about the right level of abstraction. It&#x27;s not picky about where software comes from, it just manages it. You can unzip a tarball and make it run isolated, depend on other services, and a whole lot of other neat things. If you&#x27;ve learned it on one distro you learned it for the rest, unlike SysV init. And it seems to constantly get more useful features that are all pretty easy to configure as well.