I recently made peace with the fact that Poettering, despite its many personality flaws, is here to stay. So I found a nice link on getting started with systemd that is fairly neutral in its opinions.
I can't go without saying that I despise the following parts of systemd:
- The cavilere attitude towards its (in)security
- The dismissal of opinions different that its own
- Trying to make it the one true king.
- the "Junk drawer" of its libraries (everyone blamed poor ssh for the xz backdoor when it was systemd's gratutitous use of logging libraries that caused the issue)
I happlily disable the following aspects (if not systemd itself, although I DO use alpine, since I am not too fond of having my systems blow up every time Poeterring (I can't ever spell its name correctly)
- REALLY crappy systemd-timesyncd (I just use chrony, which actually works)
- REALLY crappy nameservice which defaults to eviloogle Just edit your resolv.conf and chattr +i it POOF no more systemd!
- I like to have 'normal' /var/log/messages in text form.