I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn't make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.

Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.

I don't know why they are downvoting you, it's true. I'm dealing with this kind of problem currently.. sometimes the boot lasts forever to the point that I have to use AltGr+SysRq commands to force kill everything.. other times it simply boots as normal. It's not consistent at all.

At least before with the old init it was relatively simple to dig into the scripts and make changes to them.. I feel now with systemd it's a lot more opaque and harder to deal with. I wouldn't even know how to approach the problem, systemd-analyze blame does not help, since the times I actually get to boot look normal. But I do believe it must have to do with the mountpoints because often they are what takes the longest.
Any advice on what should I do would be welcome.

Also, I have a separate Bazzite install in my living room TV, and while that one does not get locked, sometimes NetworkManager simply is not running after boot... I got fed up to the point that I wrote a workaround by creating a rc.local script to have it run, so I can have it available reliably when the system starts (that fixed it.. though some cifs mountpoints often do not get mounted.. so I'm considering adding the mount command to the same rc.local script too....).

I'd say the main bad part of systemd is how it's used and now expected everywhere.

If you search for some Linux guides or install something complicated or whatnot, they always expect you to have systemd. Otherwise, you're on your own figuring how things work on your system.

This shouldn't really happen. Otherwise, yes, it's great, it integrates neatly, and is least pain to use.

I like systemd overall. The ease of use, uniform interface and nice documentation is awesome.

Though each time I try to run it on outdated hardware (say, my Thinkpad X100e, which is, well, a life choice xD) — it makes whole system much slower. IMO, openrc is not as bad, and in some ways it gives some capabiilties of systemd these days.

I totally agree.

I hate to admit I didn't want anything to do with systemd because it took me forever to get somewhat familiar with some other mainstream init systems.

Then, I didn't care for a while until I developed software that had to keep running using some sort of init system. The obvious choice was whatever the default I had (systemd) and I fell in love with the convenience of systemd (templates, timers, ..). I started shipping sample systemd with the things I provide & yes, you are on your own if you use something else.

I've been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.

The thing I don't like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the "do one thing, do it well" Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.

My issues with systemd is that it isn't an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it's slow and doesn't seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).

Recently I've been using dinit on a system, and I'm pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I'm running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.

Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?

It's refreshing to read to someone that actually says "I was so wrong"

I was wrong also with systemd, I hated it mainly because I already knew init.d, where files are, where configs where etc. Some years later hate is gone, I'm not a power user, but I just now know how to handle my things with systemd and all is good.

I've never used any other init system since I'm relatively new to Linux (8 years of use). So, systemd is all I know. I don't mind it, but I have this one major issue with it. That "stop job for UID 1000......" Or whatever it says. It's hands down the most annoying thing I have ever experienced in Linux. Making me wait for 3 minutes sometimes is just insane. I know I can go in and make it wait for 5 seconds /etc/systemd/system.conf or whatever, but why? Also, another one usually pops up.

Other than that, I really like how I can make timers. I like how I can make scripts run on boot, logout or login. And I like how I can make an app a background service that can auto start if they ever crashed. Maybe all of this can be done with other init systems? I wouldn't know, but I like these in systemd

I use it because I'm frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.

I'm a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the "unused ram is wasted ram" phrase that has caught on with people.

I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and...require you basically to be a developer to use them.

I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can't imagine how fucked I'd be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.

Any advice on what should I do would be welcome.

You can play around with the mount option nofail, if that's set, systemd will not wait for the mount point to be ready and continue booting normally. Can be useful with HDDs that take a while to spin up and aren't needed for the boot process (e.g. backup drives, etc.).

Another thing to look out for: SDCards or USB flash drives that might randomly fail to "spin up" and hang, unplugging those helps.