Comment Re:freedesktop.org (Score 1) 555
I work on servers with systemd as the init system. Yes, it's quite possible to run a server with it. It does things that in fact make much more sense for a desktop. It's not terrible, but it's moving away from the simplicity and modularity we've come to expect.
I would say that out-of-the-box cgroups and kernel capabilities are making extremely much sense on servers. Being able to put hard limits on a service's CPU/IO/networking can only be a good thing, same with having defense in depth, by eg. preventing a service process
Same with reliable killing processes, having a total supervision chain, including PID1 itself, being able to restart crashed processes, not by simplistic means, but using rate limiting, and perhaps based on exit signals too (only restart on unclean exit signals etc).
Regarding simplicity, then I am the opinion that the old legacy script based init systems where more "crude" and "primitive" rather than simple, and their total lack of features isn't so much a virtue, than a real downside to their use; even basic features had to be hacked and bolted on top of SysVinit.
I do agree though, that systemd is a rather hefty piece of software to understand, doing things in new ways, and lots of documentation to read. It also sucks to discard knowledge about e.g. boot sequences, and relearning everything again. But looking back, there was a lot of new tech that seemed extremely complex to begin with, that these days seem trivial, so I guess some of the seeming complexity of systemd will disappear once people "get it".
Regarding modularity; people may argue all day long that systemd isn't "really modular". But the point is in many ways moot; there is no real substitute for systemd's udev or logind or journald (syslog doesn't do all what journald does and vice versa), so what did it matter if systemd increased its internal complexity by supporting other modules than these; there simply haven't materialized any alternative despite years of warning from upstream projects.
Another thing I like about systemd and its wide acceptance in all major distros, is that it is a long needed reduction in needless fragmentation, being able to share knowledge about doing certain things on so many different distros is a boon.