> Boot times were supposed to be fast, too - yet, curiously enough, systemd often ends up saying, "waiting 1m30s for..."

wouldn't that be the fault of the service it's waiting for and not systemd itself?

I wonder if its because systemd is more rigorous about prerequisites. With systemd its normal to wait until networking is up before starting, say, a webserver. But in the days before you just started it without checking.

I believe systemd is a matter of control, not tech advancement. From the fruit you tell the tree and one of the easiest to see fruit has been to change long standing ways to admin a linux box. Coincidentally, the entity who pushed for systemd in very unorthodox ways, the discussion archives are probably still online, is also the entity making money with linux certifications, which de facto expire when the long standing ways to admin a linux box get obsoleted. So I will skip systemd and criticize instead all the modesetting and plymouth and stuff that altered those 30 lines of the screen which tell me what's happening when booting, what's unusually slow, what's broken. They removed it because walls of text reeked of old difficult ways to deal with pcs, while graphics GUI were the future. But the future became LLMs and walls of texts are things to copy into a prompt if you have doubts about what they meant. I prefer letting the GUI operate on the things it does best and let the wall of text tell me how the machine is booting.

Imdeed. Ubuntu tried its own upstart for a while, and there were a few others too. Gentoo has (had?) some alternatives to sysV.. Devuan felt like boycotting systemd. Didn't seem to help stop the spread but at least you could use something else if you wanted. Systemd is indeed a bit of a mini OS under the OS. We came a long way but I also feel that the improvements didn't necessarily result in faster boots.