Poettering: The Biggest Myths

I'm not suggesting that wanting to improve one's skills is a bad thing, but characterising anyone who doesn't immediately want to jump onto every new bandwagon as lazy and incompetent is appalling.

I think that with systemd we're quickly getting past the »new bandwagon« stage. With the major enterprise-type distributions (RHEL and SLES) slated to replace System V init by systemd in the foreseeable future, administrators of machines based on these distributions, along with their spinoffs such as CentOS or Scientific Linux, could do worse than start getting used to systemd. On many other popular distributions, systemd is at least an option that is available to those interested in it, and it is quite likely that most of these distributions will also move over in time.

The nice thing is that systemd, for all it is being dissed by the traditionalists, is in fact in many ways an improvement on the tangle of »System V init plus distribution-specific init scripts plus various distribution-specific bits of infrastructure not actually part of System V init but tacked on to make it work in practice« that many system administrators are saddled with. In my experience, it doesn't take long for somebody who approaches systemd with an open mind to see that there actually might be something to it after all. Also, using systemd in place of System V init isn't exactly rocket science; it's not as if system administrators were suddenly forced to learn Mandarin in order to be able to keep their systems running.