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systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success
(blog.tjll.net)
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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Any recommendations for a good book or online resource to learn about systemd? Not "how to use it" or "ten tricks for systemd users", but how it works, what makes it tick, basically a systematic overview, end then a dive into the details.
read the man pages. type "man systemd" into a linux terminal, and when finished also read the "see also" pages at the bottom. man systemd.unit is also a "central" page, it says lots of things common to all unit file types.
when you stumble into long parameter lists, you can skip them, you probably won't use most of them. not because they are useless, though, so it's better to at least read the names of all the parameters you come across that way so you have a picture what's available.
skip systemd.directives, but know what it is: a catalogue of all systemd directives with the man page they are documented at. very useful, when you want to find something specific.
"man systemd.special" is special, it's more about its internals, very informational, but relies on preexisting knowledge
I know how to find and read man pages, therefore I was looking for something that is better structured. A view from the top, not looking at the details that a man page delivers.
The systemd website itself seems quite information-rich: https://systemd.io/
Diving into Systemd would be a book written by Nietzsche.
"Und wenn du lange in Systemd blickst, blickt Systemd auch in dich hinein."
I'm not experienced at it either and don't know the best resources.
But what I can usually recommend in case you don't want to see the usual "THIS-IS-A-PIECE-OF-THE-PUZZLE---COME-BACK-REGULARLY-FOR-MORE-CONENT" stuff, but more in depth stuff: Enter "filetype:pdf systemd" in your search engine. Google or DuckDuckGo will then only spit out pdf files about that topic... And the people who write PDF files are usually more experienced with the topic than those who write blog posts or "how to's".
Let me know if that helped in your case... :)
OK, first impression: loads of PPTs turned PDF. Not a single book far and wide...
You've got a point here, although this topic would do well as a wiki or similar linked documents.