Never thought I'd see hackers saying INI format looked ugly of all things. It's basic, sure, but that's a good thing for something meant to be easily editable by hand from any editor. Otherwise, it's just key value pairs in named sections, how ugly can it be about that?

There's definitely some weirdness to certain parts of systemd service files, but was a huge improvement over Upstart and the old SysV-style init scripts.

Over all I think Systemd get way to much criticism. You don't have to use all the parts, but if you care to go through the documentation you'll find interesting features such as journald log-shipping and systemd-machined which can manage containers and VMs.

As a passionate systemd hater I would say I do not agree. Cron syntax is worse.

This is why I like NixOS. Defining systemd services in it is very neat.

Oh yes, because the well documented clean syntax of sys v init shell scripts was so nice.

If I never recall hacking in ulimit calls in the top of buggy shell scripts for crappy old services that done respect pam_limits it won’t be soon enough.

Relevant, a golfed systemd polyglot file that is simultaneously an executable script: https://domi.work/blog/posts/compose_polyglot/

Yes, I have too much time sometimes... and I agree, I don't like the syntax.

Hard disagree. Compared to an init script, with all its boilerplate, I'd take a systemd unit file.

Could have been worse.

Could have been YAML.

Could have been XML.