[Arm-netbook] Logging and journaling

[Christopher Havel]

If I may add my own perspective.

Like most people who don't use Win or Mac, I started off my Linux journey
with Ubuntu. This was 2007 or so. I eventually (through a story far too
long to relate here, particularly since it's not relevant) settled on Puppy
Linux of various varieties for my main distro. Puppy, AFAIK, uses BusyBox
Init. When SystemD started being developed, it was universally reviled by
almost the entire Puppy community... we lost a couple members that way,
IIRC.

Anyways, I have heard a lot about SystemD, almost all of it negative. While
I have not, to my knowledge, interacted directly with the devs of it, I
have heard that they tend to dismiss any bug or issue they are notified
with, as "not our problem" -- the underlying attitude being, why make more
work for *us* when you can change *your* code to adapt? A similar attitude
seems to be prevalent about adopting it -- hey, new kid on the block, let's
get to know each other -- and to heck with anyone who doesn't like it.

I find those sorts of attitudes troubling, to say the least. It reminds me
a little too well of the Borg, from *Star Trek*...

Yet, my distro of choice right now is not Puppy. (Another painfully long
irrelevant story.) I'm using Linux Mint 18.0, and it runs SystemD
underneath everything. So far, I have absolutely zero complaints. SystemD
has not yet shot my cat, metaphorically or otherwise.

Am I converted? No. I am still skeptical. Would I choose another init
system, given the choice? Absolutely. Puppy's cobbled-together nasty
pile-of-patches mess of a BusyBox Init served me well for many years and
I'd take it back in a heartbeat.

But is SystemD something that keeps me up nights chewing my nails about
whether or not my computer will boot tomorrow? Absolutely not.

I have my concerns about how SystemD has been formed and how it propagates.
But, by the same token, the people who designed it are not *complete*
idiots, regardless of how developed they are (or aren't) socially, because
it at least *seems* to work well enough to withstand everyday use... so far
at least. I know that SystemD tends to be a divisor amongst Linux users and
devs -- you either really love it or you really hate it -- but I find it a
little hard to get passionate about it, one way or the other, at this point.

Please don't shoot me. I'm just a messenger :)
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