It’s not just init.d that exists, alternative init systems such as dinit and OpenRC are a thing. The general complaint about systemd is that it’s too heavy and complicated for something as simple as an init system, and it has already gone way beyond that.

This does not only increase the attack surface of a Linux system drastically, giving way to exploits and potentially backdoors, but it also puts too much power in a piece of software’s hands as more and more things start depending on it.

And systemd is not even needed to create a user-friendly Linux system anyway. Chimera Linux with GNOME would be as smooth an experience as Fedora Linux if only it had more software in its repositories and PackageKit support.

I have the following complaints about systemd:

1. It was created basically by lennart because after RHEL 6 did pretty much the worst implementation ever of upstart he got NIH syndrome about it
2. Red Hat played a lot of dirty politics early on to get systemd everywhere (my tinfoil hat theory is that Red Hat let Lennart’s NIH syndrome run away with it because they thought having more control over the init system would be beneficial)
3. It’s subsuming everything, often with no real benefit over what it replaces.

The first two aren’t actually issues with systemd, but rather are political issues I have around the way Red Hat bullies the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I’m not going to let that become a stopping point for my using what is actually a fairly good piece of tech. The third is actually an ongoing issue, but it’s not enough for me to try throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is, however, IMO a continuation of Red Hat’s sketchy political play.

It’s because you now need to do systemctl restart sshd instead of /etc/init.d/sshd restart, I see no other reason than having to learn new syntax.

Arguably, init.d scripts were easier to understand, and systemd is a bit of a black box, it somehow works, but who knows where it writes logs or saves the process pid (it’s all in the documentation somewhere), with init.d script you can just open the script itself and look.