"Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult" <enrico.weigelt@???> wrote:

> At that point I'm curious which fancy features of systemd are needed
> by applications at all ?

In general - none !
But, it seems that the technique being used by it's proponents is to substitute their stuff and "force" new APIs on developers. Ie, pick a target (whether that's DNS, NTP, Syslog, ...), roll their own substitute, include that substitute by default.

So while applications might not actually need any feature in SystemD - over time the devs will find it harder and harder to not use the new systemd APIs (which will certainly be the case as distros switch more and more to default to systemd, and start dropping the traditional tools as "too much work").

Once the dev is using the new APIs, it then makes it harder for users to continue using the older (and more reliable ?) tools that we already know and that have stood the test of time. At some point, I can see some devs start to ask along the lines of "why continue supporting two APIs ?" and stop maintaining the code to use one of them - if the majority of distros are using systemd then we know which one will get dropped.