My desktop PC in the office asked if I want to update it to Ubuntu 15.04. I agreed, I need a stable PC in the office, so I am running the easiest distributive here. Imagine my surprise when it did not boot after the upgrade. After a few pokes and reboots I noticed "Booting version 217" line, or something like this. Then it struck me: I have a systemd-powered OS now!
Months of looking at that abomination in despair are over, I now can have first hand experience with it.
I managed to boot it, fixed a few problems here and there, and started to think that it is really "just works" like its supporters like to claim. Only until I stepped away from my computer for a bit and found my one of screens complete black. I still have not figured the source of it, but I got enough to be angry already.
The logs are crap, but at least I found that I have a systemd-backlight in a broken state. Well, I do not have any backlight in the office PC, so I decided to remove it. How naive... Turns out systemd-backlight is an integrated part of systemd and can only be removed with the entire systemd! Which would make my PC completely unsuable. Just think about it, some item, that only a subset of users would ever need is so tightly integrated with the init system, that it can not be removed. It may be removed during the compile time. But try to find it in the documentation, it is not there! To make it easier, here is the parameter from the ./configure.ca: --disable-backlight, but if I wanted to do that in the office, I would've used Gentoo. Which I have at home and which runs perfectly with OpenRC.
But the most annoying bit was when I tried to mask that backlight unit. Of course I did that from the command line, but then systemd prompted me for my sudo password via a GUI (!) prompt. Twice!
I can not believe how broken it is at the moment.