Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd -- BSDCan 2018

> Tacitly: most people don’t like launchd, but they don’t interact with it either. Find me a person who writes or debugs launchd plists and you’ll find that: > [...] > 2. they don’t like launchd This is true in my case, although the main thing on my mind when I work with launchd my main complaint often boils down to 'I wish this were more like systemd'. IME, systemd has much nicer CLIs, more capabilities, clearer and more comprehensive documentation, more abundant examples, and more conveniences/less privileges required for per-user stuff. The simple INI format for systemd units is also a lot easier and nicer to deal with than the XML format that plists use, even though there's a lot of tooling around plists. > even if it weren’t there is a built in backup/restore system that literally restores the machine to its entire previous state. I get this for free on NixOS and it's really easy to get on other distros by plugging /etc/systemd into etckeeper, even without a snapshotting filesystem. (Plus many distros have backups via snapshots of CoW filesystems built in just like macOS does.) > launchd and systemd aren’t even comparable, one is part of a monolithic proprietary operating system and the other is an ecosystem that is semi-modular which lends itself strongly to being an entire layer of your computing experience (dubbed: “the system layer” by Lennart Poettering). Benno says literally all of this in his talk. He even has a diagram with the phrase 'system layer' up on a slide