Nothing. Systemd is a suite of software that handle a lot of the low-level operations on Linux (In particular, the service manager, some network configuration, along with some other stuff). Historically, those operations were handled by different services (like SysvInit).

A lot of people are mad about it for a lot of reasons, but if you're not a system administrator, it's probably better to stick with systemd, since it's what most of the linux community has standardized on, and thus it's much easier to find information online about using those systems.

I _am_ a system administrator and systemd has been an overwhelmingly net positive for me

Amen to this. I understand some of the complaints with it getting into name resolution and other things, but having had to decipher vendors init scripts it's a huge improvement for managing services.

When you add in things like Podman and it's use of systemd it's overall not a bad thing at all.

>but if you're not a system administrator

And even, probably, if you are.

> What's the impact of having systemd (or not) for the everyday layman like me that just uses Visual Studio Code to build flutter apps ?

Compared to initrd, after Debian upgrading to systemd, the system boots slightly faster and shuts down slightly slower (or same speed, depends really what you run)

By "unencumbered by systemd" they mostly mean "works worse". We've removed tens of thousands lines of fixes for "easy", "simple" sysv scripts when we upgraded our servers to version that runs systemd.

most of the general purpose distributions use systemd. Almost every general purpose distro you've ever heard of. They all adopted it by choice, because they thought it was a better option than the alternatives for one reason or the other.

Basically, don't worry about it.

Very little.

It's an idealogical flamewar, that in most cases is without impact.

The binary format of the log file still seems to me to be a bad idea - it introduces corruptibility and complexity to a vital service that should be simple and uncorruptible.

If a failing system starts to do weird things, plain text append only logging is preferable.

It’s a problem because people do not wish to learn new paradigms. Put me in that camp - took months to debug a 90 second hang and work around it. Of course, fast boot owes to its parallelization.

> What's the impact of having systemd (or not) for the everyday layman like me that just uses Visual Studio Code to build flutter apps ?

Nothing. I run Void Linux Musl with XFCE and I have no issue running Steam and other big glibc programs in Flatpak, docker, etc.