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> I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky.
It indeed is tricky. To be honest, I wasn't "put off" by it because I've been using BSDs and old-style Linux startup systems for almost 30 years now... but the lack of abstraction shows, and I don't think it's great.
The daemon(8) wrapper is neat to integrate pre-existing servers into rc.d, but I do not fancy having to deal with that "by hand" nor to create a shell script to manage my own service (related from a few years ago: https://jmmv.dev/2020/08/rcd-libexec-etc.html) nor to have something entirely separate to manage log rotation.
As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process "supervisor" is a better model. BUT, as I mentioned in this article, I also like the "no churn" of the BSDs because what I learned and refined over ~30 years is still similar to this day and that I won't be bitten by surprises.
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Not GP, but I do prefer the very direct control you get with rcctl (OpenBSD), openrc (Alpine),... Systemd often feels like autoconf. It's needed when you really want the capabilities, otherwise the opaqueness and complexity feels very much cumbersome when you're dealing with a simple service.
I do like the Unix way of having different components handling different tasks instead of having different things which are entangled with each other. It encourages transparency.
> As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process "supervisor" is a better model.
I've been playing with dinit for a bit now; it combines a lot of the nice advantages of systemd with a finite scope and being portable across OSs.
Even with daemon(8), PID files and the lack of process supervision might be my least favorite aspect of FreeBSD, an OS I like overall. Not long ago, I wanted to avoid running a custom service that way on a fresh FreeBSD server. After researching my options, I found an adequate solution in the daemontools family. I'd heard of daemontools but hadn't paid much attention to it.
My service has been managed by runit and, most recently, nitro (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/nitro). Both have run as the service's user. They supervise the process and handle logging. I have found the design of daemontools and its derivatives runit and nitro elegant; it lives up to the reputation.