> Or because it makes maintaining a distro so much easier ?
In my experience, such a general statement is not true of any init system. I had to maintain a systemd-based system (albeit not a general-purpose one) and I was moderately happy. The profiling tools are great and units are easy to write even by people with no Linux development experience (hint: easy to outsource to cheap consultancy firms). On the other hand, it's extremely complex; if you get into trouble with systemd itself, you've got a lot of code reading to do. systemd upstream itself is a pretty volatile target, so you regularly end up with things that used to work three versions ago but now bork.
Maybe for a general-purpose distribution like Debian, or for a special-purpose, but server-/cloud-oriented distribution, it makes life easier, but at the other end of the spectrum I wouldn't say it made my life any easier than other init system (albeit not much harder, either).
In my experience, such a general statement is not true of any init system. I had to maintain a systemd-based system (albeit not a general-purpose one) and I was moderately happy. The profiling tools are great and units are easy to write even by people with no Linux development experience (hint: easy to outsource to cheap consultancy firms). On the other hand, it's extremely complex; if you get into trouble with systemd itself, you've got a lot of code reading to do. systemd upstream itself is a pretty volatile target, so you regularly end up with things that used to work three versions ago but now bork.
Maybe for a general-purpose distribution like Debian, or for a special-purpose, but server-/cloud-oriented distribution, it makes life easier, but at the other end of the spectrum I wouldn't say it made my life any easier than other init system (albeit not much harder, either).