My main beef with systemd's retardation is how it replaces well known systems like cron, syslog and resolveconf with it's own, shittier methods of doing things, and when distro's all started deepthroating Poettering's dick as hard as possible they put in a bunch of clunky workarounds to keep the old configs working without really explaining shit which made it worse.
Systemd timers are great actually, and they destroy cron in terms of usability and granularity. Systemd units are also similarly good, being completely declarative ini syntax, with a bunch of different behaviours you can configure for rather than have to program in shell script. It covers 99% of system service use cases.
I still think poettering is a faggot.
I think if Arch was bad as people made it out to be Valve would not have switched to it from Debian.
It's anecdotal, but debian stable has been more unstable than arch for me. It makes assumptions about things that I don't want it to, like launching an httpd the moment you install it. I've had debian boxes just totally unrecoverably die on me on multiple occasions, more than ubuntu too. Arch has only ever broken because I did something stupid, where I would just chroot in, figure out what is wrong, fix it and reboot. Debian breaks itself with normal operation. The one thing I don't like about arch is if I leave an old arch computer or vm lying around, eventually the pacman certs expire and updating becomes very annoying and nontrivial.
What's that thing you want to control that you can't control on Debian?
Nothing, you can control literally everything, but it has stupid shit littered everywhere that it doesn't need to, like the service restart prompt script, install scripts launching services, directories being moved to weird locations from the default, flawed config updating system, poor quality control for debian unstable. Always ends with a broken machine for me one way or another. I could figure out how to do the required maintenance manually or I could just use arch and not do that.
