Not a hater of systemd per se, sometimes it's annoying but to me it's eh whatever

But the root issue, is it violates the ancient GNU/Linux philosophy of making one tool do one thing and having it do that one thing very well. If you need to do complicated things, then you make multiple tools in a way that you can chain them to accomplish those tasks

It's why the core tools of linux: awk, grep, cat, sort etc are the way that they are

SystemD violates this by being, well, everything. It's now handling networking and daemons and boot and a myriad of other things hence the meme

Whether you see this as a good, bad or neutral thing depends on how closely you follow the tool philosophy

I’m a beginner to intermediate level home desktop user of Linux. I think I represent a small or at least low priority class of people with complaints, but for me it’s that it’s been confusing to learn how the distro is glued together.

I find sometimes things are handled in pre-systemd ways, sometimes with systemd, and sometimes custom scripts. Basically it is mentally hard having something on the system that duplicates functionality and not knowing which I should use to not clash with the vision of the distro maintainers.

Actually this is really a complaint about distro documentation not systemd. If you know of any documentation about the design decisions behind any major distro, I’m interested. Not forums where people piece together how to fix things, or wikis that document findings on how things behave in a distro. Something from the maintainers like, “Here’s are the scripts we added that are above/beyond the base distro (if Debian based) or above/beyond POSIX”. The only place I’ve seen this is Linux From Scratch.