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Well, it takes 30m the first time, when learning from scratch. When learning the arcane cron entry system, I'd guess it takes even longer than 30m, unless you have a simple time in mind (like "every minute" or something similar - "every second Monday" is definitely more complex to reason about in cron). Again, comparing not knowing systemd timer vs not knowing cron.

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Sure, not saying you can just sit down and do it straight away. But the additional complexity of systemd, I think, makes it even more daunting. It’s much like how modern frontend has a million components. I understand there are or were reasons for all of it, but not everyone needs it, and it’s intimidating to a newcomer.

In comparison, cron (and *nix tooling in general) asks you to learn a small bit of that tool’s syntax, and that’s it. You can add complexity if you’d like – read the man pages – but for the most part, you can be productive very quickly.

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