Well, note that the article is mostly about the core systemd service management part. The article also clearly studies quality of design and implementation, accepting core goals of systemd core as they are.<p>One problem with «shinier, newer, better, securer systemd» is that many systemd opponents want something less shiny. And systemd is big and shiny enough that _even_ sysvinit is better.<p>Most arguments for sysvinit you list are, for example, arguments for s6: s6 is just a supervision suite with no other ambitions, PID 1 during the normal operation (not boot&#x2F;shutdown) is s6-svscan — a 32 KiB executable, and the part that requires debugging — service launch scripts — can still be a shell script.<p>I am a systemd hater (at least for my patterns of desktop use — systemd can be mostly fine on some servers) and my opinion of systemd is that it is mediocre as a service management, has bad logging system bundled (is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.freedesktop.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=69934#c7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.freedesktop.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=69934#c7</a> fixed? can the systemd-bundled logging system give me the last 20 lines of the log without reading all 100 MiB of the log file — it previously could not?), and breaks my workflow hard (nothing similar to startx can be implemented by design <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.freedesktop.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;systemd-devel&#x2F;2012-February&#x2F;004614.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.freedesktop.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;systemd-devel&#x2F;2012-Feb...</a> for example), and systemd updates make systemd try to control more of the system which I explicitly do not want controlled automatically (I have a very handy binding for standby, and I do not want the notebook to suspend on lid close; I have multiple network configuration scripts for each of three typical locations and choose between them depending on whether I plan to move around more than transfer multiple-GiB files; killing all this autoconfig requires work).<p>I would probably use uselessd just to avoid bothering if NixOS shipped it instead of full systemd; it doesn&#x27;t so it is more comfortable for me to use a NixPkgs-based system with init=&#x2F;bin&#x2F;sh and minimal hand-written init scripts than stock systemd. I was capable to use systemd almost fine until systemd has ensured that startx-like functionality is impossible to get.<p>Edit: a typo