I'm not sure what was so controversial about that one post. I did send it right before going to sleep, and I was starting to nod off during the second paragraph so I got it close enough and sent it. Then edited it today to clarify what I was trying to say. But my point is.
1 you can just use the same tools you use on any other unit for networking.
2 the main place I see it as actually different, and the way it effects other init systems today, is everything that has been built around logins. I was going to say something about systemd-boot with it. But that's fairly easy to completely cut out. And doesn't effect much if you don't implement it's way of doing things for that at least.
My biggest problem with systemd is that the one thing it says it does "Faster startup and shutdown" doesn't actually work.
Even when things are perfect you'll get random hangs, especially on shutdown. It's even worse if something is wrong like the NFS server is crashed and it will take many minutes to reboot/shutdown. Old init systems did this well. kill -HUP, kill -KILL, reboot() and fuck the hung processes.
You can tell it to not wait for the process if it doesn't stop right away. And to send it a sigkill either right away, or with a shorter period than 90 seconds.
Because that's what it's doing when you are waiting. It sent a sigterm, that didn't stop the process, so it waits 90 seconds to send a sigkill. I want to say you can adjust the behavior in system.conf (you can for sure adjust it, I just can't remember if that is the file or it's another).
Yes, I'm just talking about the OOTB features it uses since the guy that post was in reply to is a beginner looking for a beginner friendly distro, and I believe that systemd-networkd/resolved are so bad its criminal, much less beginner friendly. I have never gotten so much cancer with DNS hijacking. If I never hear the words "Host not found" again it would be too soon.
I don't think I've ever had much of an issue with that. But most of my experience with systems is on arch. So even though there are the tools that come with systems.
Its completely up to you on how you are going to set up networking from the beginning.
I'm not sure if that's different in Debian based distros. I wouldn't be surprised if it is, because a big part of the reason I got so annoyed trying to move to those after using arch is because they do a bunch of configuration for me. And undoing all the bullshit they put there is way more work than just copying the files I have that set up things how I want.
So for networking. I would just install whatever solutions for it I wanted. Enable them. And that's about all I needed to do as far as the actual init system goes.
Really just using systemd-resolved, but just as a client for normal desktop dns stuff, it actually worked well for me. Though I did make sure to get it set up properly. The only time I ever had issues was with dnnsec if you run it with that on strictly because a lot of places won't have dnnsec set up so sites get blocked. But while I was using it. It was just as reliable for me as any of the standalone dns resolvers in that specific use case.
I actually wonder, if people that hate systemd the most are people that use Debian or Debian based distros that set up a lot more of it for you. Now that I think about it. I wouldn't be surprised if that does tend to be the case.