The good people over at Infoworld have published a story outlining why they feel systemd is a disaster.
Excerpt from Infoworld:
While systemd has succeeded in its original goals, it's not stopping there. systemd is becoming the Svchost of Linux—which I don't think most Linux folks want. You see, systemd is growing, like wildfire, well outside the bounds of enhancing the Linux boot experience. systemd wants to control most, if not all, of the fundamental functional aspects of a Linux system—from authentication to mounting shares to network configuration to syslog to cron. It wants to do so as essentially a monolithic entity that obscures what's happening behind the scenes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zafiro17 on Tuesday August 19 2014, @07:43PM
Glad to hop on this bandwagon. OP is totally right. I just downloaded and installed LinuxBBQ the other day (www.linuxbbq.org) and by default it installs LILO and I found myself gushing over how simple and easy LILO is compared to Grub legacy, too. I accepted Grub over LILO because it did away with the risk of forgetting to re-run lilo and borking your system. But it was never clear to me why Grub needed to be updated. In fact somewhere out there is a little utility you could run on a floppy disk that would let you boot Linux or a dozen other OSes. Forget what it's called, but in theory it provided more improvements over grub than the new version of grub ever did. Fooey on all this "improvement." Get offa my lawn, while you're at it.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @10:03PM
a little utility you could run on a floppy disk that would let you boot Linux or a dozen other OSes
Sounds like you're talking about PLoP Boot Manager.
Smart Boot Manager is another that is commonly mentioned.
There's a scad of them. [wikipedia.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @11:28PM
If, instead of replacing your working kernel, you added a second kernel entry at the end of your LILO config, then if you forget to rerun LILO the worst that happens is you have to boot into your old kernel, run lilo, then reboot.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday August 20 2014, @11:59PM
more complicated without adding much (directly related) benefit = breakage
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday August 23 2014, @05:44AM
Use syslinux, you swine. Syslinux will crush you all!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti