Nice? Perhaps it depends on perspective.
To me, systemd is designed with devices in mind such as desktops, laptops, tablets and so forth. Maybe it’s even good for servers that are rebooted often or have a highly variable application suite. I can see some features of systemd being a real blessing for those environments. But for me, coming from an environment where we had thousands of servers, but only a handful of server configurations, and where one job/app would run weeks or months (or years in a few cases), most of the “benefits” of systemd are not actually beneficial and it represents change for the sake of change, not progress.
But, as I said, that was then.
Now, in my new post-supercomputing life?
Meh.
If systemd is what it takes to get a kitchen sink platform such as NS to work (or Koozali and similar, not to mention the desktop and portable device distros), then I’ll “forget” everything I used to know (okay, that was humor, since the brain malfunction has done that for me already) and just be an application installer and configuration manager. Whatever I can do via the server manager interface, that is essentially what I’ll do. I don’t see myself ever doing actual system administration or engineering or development again, so it doesn’t really matter what’s under the hood. So long as it works.
Just finished installing NS7 on a virtual machine. Now on to that installation and configuration part 