Honestly, what kind of complex init system do most /servers/ need?
But the issue is actually that systemd is not just an init system it's steadily increasing in scope to incorporate more and more services.
My CentOS 7 OSD nodes will sometimes not complete booting because it's hung somewhere in the boot process. There is no way to tell systemd to continue, Ctrl + C doesn't do anything and there is no way to get into the system because sshd is still not running.
Booting it in debug mode to try and get more information makes the whole thing work.
Also, when a unit file gets stuck, it goes into this waiting loop, which is a giant pain in the behind... I want to try and fix it, not wait 10+ minutes for the unit files to time out.
Ctrl + C should immediately stop what it is trying to do and dump me into some sort of login shell so that I can then go and fix the issue...
I've also had issues on Ubuntu 16.04 because of third party software that doesn't correctly set up it's Requires/Wants/Before/After's and then systemd will happily hang the whole boot process. Worst thing is that these issues become more and more apparent on systems with more cores/CPU's... so the 44 core, 88 thread systems we have show the issue way more than the 4 thread desktop that developers are using...
Systemd in their infinite wisdom decided that journald can choose when to log and when not to log something. Historically, syslog etc have been a very thin barrier between programs and outputting logs. Journald now decides if and as and when it's going to bother putting logging data to disk.
One of the things they've decided is you don't really need logs when you run the reboot command. In fact, if you really want logs you have to dig in to their documentation to find this: https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Debugging/#ind...
That tells you to adjust kernel parameters and write a file to disk to explicitly re-enable logging.
I lost a whole bunch of time recently troubleshooting something on a server running systemd that was interfering with the reboot process, because systemd logged sweet FA. I had a pretty good idea what the problem was, but lack of logs made it significantly harder to nail down. The actual problem is one I've run into all sorts of times in the past, and in every non-systemd case, there's always been enough detail in the logs from the init system to nail it precisely from the get go.
How many of those services have dependancies on devices that may or may not be online/attached at any point in time?
For example, systemd-timesyncd (controlled with timedatectl) is an excellent NTP system, and after it's been stable for a few years I'll use it with public NTP servers. It takes just one command to get up and running and it keeps your clocks synchronized, what's not to like?
And considering systemd's vs OpenBSD's track record I suppose it's also less likely to get you owned or set your time to Jan 1st 1970 because of some bullshit like "who could have predicted that in 2016 networks are still so bad that UDP can deliver packets out of order".
And, btw, why should an init system come bundled with a time client or a time client bundled with an init system? When can I expect systemd-solitaire?
That's entirely up to distribution packagers. 39k bytes and you get a dead-simple working ntp client daemon (no server) which requires literally no setup. If the distro packagers want to split it out or not include it at all, they can do that and the build system is set up to make that easy.
So it really depends on how you mean "bundled", it's good and there's basically no reason not to include it in the package.
I also figure it's a bit of a straw man to hypothesize a bug which hasn't occurred. NTP, as far as I'm aware, is mostly static structures on the wire. If there's a problem with the client, it's most likely your clock will just be wrong; bad as that is.
http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/init/ http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/ntpd/
Alas there is no OpenBSD-solitaire yet, but who really needs that if you can play "Hunt the Wumpus" instead: