Another thing which IMHO systemd gets right (although it's definitely not the first to go this way, just the mainstreamest): daemons used to have to be able to damonize, log to syslog, setuid to a different user, etc. - a functionality implemented separately in each daemon (or included via libdaemon or similar). Now, a daemon is just a regular program, logging to stderr and the only thing it still needs to do is re-exec on sighup.

So let's just wait for all the deamons to remove the cruft and then we can switch to daemontools :).

I feel about systemd pretty much as you do, but there is one obvious advantage: the unit files for the most common things are very readable and quite obvious, without the boilerplate. I currently wouldn't want to do anything more complex with sytemd but for a basic daemon that just has to be started (as user x, after service y), it's actually *very* easy to read and write a unit file.

Now, if we could only add #!/usr/bin/systemd-unit-run to them and run them under sysvinit... :)

Hey, I still use such a laptop (486SX, 8MB, 120MB). It runs Basic Linux with packages from Slackware 3.5, libc4, egcs-2.95, perl-5.003 and current version of hugs (which is terrible because it garbage collects for 30s!) and apache-1.2
Otherwise speed is not a problem, disk space is (no room for the kernel source :)).
I also tried minix but it doens't have the driver for my WiFi card and propably wouldn't run elinks anyway.