FYI, all ordering options in systemd are relative and not absolute. You cannot guarantee in systemd that X will be started before Y, because that&#x27;s not how it works. You declare an approximate dependency and ordering scheme, which is then fed into a graph, optimized and recalculated in memory on every bootup and state-modifying operation. There is no determinism in the boot order due to parallelism and some other constraints, so you can potentially have services be malignantly reordered or fail because of cyclical transactions, loops and stuck jobs.<p>The point is that, if you&#x27;re thinking of it as a linear ordered sequence, you have the wrong mental model. On the other hand, systems like OpenRC <i>do</i> work that way.