Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part XVIII (controllers)

I believe systemd actually comes the closest of all init systems. Many upstream packages already ship systemd units -- just "make install" and possibly "systemctl enable foo" required. Compared to SysV where your distro's package maintainer duplicated a shell script for each package, and assigned a "priority number" on an arbitrary scale to order service startup.

It also replaces several other pieces that had to be manually configured before. As the article mentiones, systemd services share CPU time equally by default, not depending on the number of processes they have like before.

And many more I can think of: Most systemd users probably don't even realize that it includes a readahead tool for speeding up system startup. It works without any hacks and configuration within LXC/namespace containers. If you want a serial console, you only need to configure it in one place (on the kernel command line). Instead of distros supplying acpid and a maintainer-written script for power button events, systemd has a simple built-in default policy -- so shutting down VMs from the host works out of the box. And many more that I can't remember right now.

So, many things that seem like duct-taped together in other systems (usually by distro package maintainers), or things that required unnecessary amounts of fiddling and configuration -- now systemd does The Right Thing using a sensible built-in policy and provides straightforward configuration options.