Systemd is not good. It tries to solve too many things and tries to extend and replace more and more core functionality. So many security holes. In a year or two, we will look back and say it was a very bad timeframe and several bad decisions. Unfortunately both Debian and Redhat switched to systemd, meaning all distros based on them as well. Only a few distros are left, let's hope some sane people revert that hype.
systemd, i.e the init system is quite good.
I mean compared to sysvinit and upsart it's a pleasure to write unit files.
they are way more understood than any sysvinit script.
I even think that just the declarative language is probably one of the best. it is better than windows services, where one need to use some kind of installer/wrapper that exactly uses what windows provides (and is unflexible in configuration), than upstart the syntax was a little bit wierd and sysvinit... well if you weren't a bash scripter it was really really hard to write a good init script.
i also like journald, logging is a pleasure now, even to syslog, and other syslog servers.
well what I don't get is timedatectl i.e systemd-timesync and many more. they are mostly not needed for init itself and already had a really really good counterpart.
As a sysadmin, I like systemd. The built-in service watchdog is really nice, and I like being able to override service file options without replacing the service entirely.
I haven't seen many vulnerabilities in the PID 1 part of systemd that concerned me. The last vuln I recall was the UID parsing issue, which isn't really exploitable.
The systemd-resolved vuln was pretty bad, but that's an optional component that I've never used anyway. (It's not used by default on Debian.)
I've got no 'skin in the game' as I don't use Linux, but ask yourself, if systemd is so bad, why is it so popular amongst distro maintainers? There must be some things its doing right. Even if you don't like systemd it's still a good idea to understand those that do, if nothing else it'll make you more effective in a debate about it.
Systemd was popular with distro maintainers before GNOME started to be built around it. What was responsible for that initial surge of popularity (amongst distro maintainers)?
