i'm a small time admin, running about 100+ wireless nodes for artisans, private and commercial users. the -majority- of users running debian on desktops (autopilot upgrades rolled out), the rest are smartphones etc. windows is -actively- banned from the network. all routers, servers, firewalls are running debian, handrolled with lenny, wheezy and jessie, but all configs by the book, and audited by an experienced 2nd set of eyes. i'm 35 years in computing, telecoms and electronics. systemd is the worst single time-waster event in my professional career. although not yet enabled by default in jessie, it's causing a -lot- of disruption with basics like remote rebooting becoming an economical hazard (petrol costs), remote desktops not cranking up, auto logins not working (previously reliable packages like gdm3 break on upgrade due to forced dependencies to systemd related packages), endless hangs on startup/shutdown, many users complain about slow shutdowns, or machines not shutting down at all, services not starting. and yes: i understand how the beast works, and i can see the beast is doomed. the logging is a ---fucking--- nightmare, works fine on paper, but is making it impossible to get basic stuff done when in the real world things break, and taking the unreadable logs with it into the ether. i'm yet to see a machine that actually booted faster, or indeed shut down faster. agressive parallelization seems to apply ony for a subset of computing equipment i'm unfamiliar with. i can already hear the smart arse comments from corporate armchair admins: 'do this, do that ...' but the reality is that the problems caused by the yet flaky systemd is creating such an extra workload that is buries any hope of getting to grips with it. driving to each customer and wipe the systems fucked by systemd and re-install them with wheezy or carefully pruned jessie is cheaper, and we can all have our lives back. i never thought i'll be wading through backported software again ... for regular user systemd brings no obvious advantages, at least not for their ancient harddrives on single core desktops - but instead a few ended up with trashed installs, e.g. by old non-critical errors being dragged into an upgrade and then breaking on (remote) reboot. if i hadn't left the core machinery on lenny and wheezy i'd be in deep shit now, and likely going out of business. stefan zalewski, burren.org

Whenever I forget to wipe gnome3 from a fresh install and replace it with something that is actually useable in the office: "Where is all my stuff gone?!". I've been installing -thousands- of pc and laptop with debian, mostly in work environments. E.g. not being able to paste to desktop in xfce makes it an instant fail, no matter how entrenched the devs maybe. But not having any desktop to begin with definitely requires the removal of gnome3 or my removal from my job. I'm yet to see any office that uses such things as a touchscreen, gnome3 or unity for work. Many unpaid nightshifts ahead ...