I was annoyed with binary logs until I found cases where compressing logs was literally 10x or more improvement, like if you ran into a bug that just repeatedly spit the same log.

And I know logrotate compresses text logs too but if you're going to compress logs into tar.gz, might as well just make it binary by default and have a nice interface (journald) on top

You know it's not a single binary, right ? Systemd is a bunch of different, mostly single usage, mostly optional, binaries. As far as Unix philosophy goes, Systemd is definitely following the principles, which is not the case for the Kernel for instance.

As for the binary logs, I used to hate it, but then, not having to manually parse logs for filtering is really nice.

I do have my issues with Systemd, but it not following the Unix philosophy is not one of them.

It's not people disliking it that makes no sense to me; everyone has their opinions.

I just can't imagine having the level of anger displayed by some of the most vocal of the anti-systemd crowd.

Richard P. Gabriel, in his essay “The Rise of Worse-is-Better,” expounds on this theme (see Appendix A). His thesis is that the Unix design philosophy requires that all design decisions err on the side of implementation simplicity, and not on the side of correctness, consistency, or completeness. He calls this the “Worse Is Better” philosophy and shows how it yields programs that are technically inferior to programs designed where correctness and consistency are paramount, but that are evolutionarily superior because they port more easily. Just like a virus.

The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command that does precisely one function, and does it well (...) This philosophy, in the hands of amateurs, leads to inexplicably mind-numbing botches like the existence of two programs, “head” and “tail,” which print the first part or the last part of a file, depending. Even though their operations are duals of one another, “head” and “tail” are different programs, written by different authors, and take different options!

From The Unix Hater's Handbook

(I like Linux, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows)

There's also a few cases of feature and scope creep, including the infamous systemd-resolved.
Your job is to launch services, manage logs, and do timers and relaunches on a service crash. DNS is out of scope, leave that to existing services.

A single binary? What?

Systemd changing from text to binary logs is my pet peeve.

Fast searchable compressed files is a fantastic idea.

The other day on a thread here about "people who use other init systems, why?" and i wrote about my experience with systemd and git downvoted for mysterious reasons. Other people that did the same as me also got their downvote sixpacks. And now they want to make it seem like it's just the people that hate systemd the annoying ones...

What systemd binary is the worst offender, in your opinion?

be nice to him, he's baffled

Good news is that systemd is not incorporating age verification just like they are not incorporating name verification.

Both name and birth date are just userdb fields with no verification at all.

As someone who designs systems as part of his job, "it violates Linux philosophy" is a perfectly valid reason to hate something as critical and low level as an init system.

I think "hate" is a strong word, mind, but following consistent design patterns and constraining scope matters. The problem is that it's one of those things that doesn't tend to matter until shit hits the fan.

The scope creep exponentially raises the efforts needed to properly test, troubleshoot, secure, and just generally work with the project code. The unique design creates rough edges for integrations with other pre-existing systems and tools, while also raising the effort needed for troubleshooting when something goes wrong.

There's also the whole "Chesterton's Fence" aspect to a lot of it, where the project runner's overall attitude has been dismissive of existing conventions and separation of functionality.

There's a lot of perfectly valid reasons to dislike it. That said, I think full on hate is extreme for an aspect of the overall Linux "system" and "user experience" that most users never interact with. Like having an opinion on the order your BIOS handles things in.