Sad to see these type quirks will go away when Linux moves completely to Wayland.
I started using Linux when I was 25 or so. I'm 51 now. I do believe there's a far from zero probability that X is going to outlast me... Even if I live until 80!
P.S: and the day X dies, in decades, I do also think it's possible that, at long last, Wayland shall be as customizable and allows to do all the amazing thing X allows to do.
Because with wayland you don't write "just" a window manager - you write also the gorilla and most of the jungle, because a "WM" also has to be full Window Server with handling of input, rendering, display configuration, possibly linking extra virtual displays (still haven't figured exactly what part of the protocol handles it, but apparently pipewire can create virtual display that can be used for example by OBS)
I know because I needed it while it had been missing :p
However, this doesn't seem to work with the newer Electron style apps, like Teams. They do not appear to follow the classic Windows patterns.
In XFCE, it's easy to create a completely transparent panel running Window Buttons with "show minimized windows only" ticked, which emulates putting the icons on the desktop but corrals them to always show up in one location. Typically, if I have more than one minimized window, I've made a mistake -- but that's what the corral is for, saving me from mistakes.
(I use fluxbox with rofi)
Even if you were building a system for which init stages would be immutable, forever sealed and unchanging, determining the correct ordering means understanding every daemon and all their associated quirks and their dependencies and the quirks associated with their dependencies and so on...
I will never get the hours spent being a human SAT solver trying to safely order hundreds of lexicographically ordered start and stop scripts that may or may not be present in an unbelievable number of permutations.
The reason sysvinit is extinct is neither fashion or politics, but evolution.
Your doing it wrong. You don't want too many services on a single server.
eg. if your sshd is set after initRandom, but unit random is set after timesync, and timesync depends on network because ntp... if you only have lan and your ntp servers aren't reachable (or offline) you don't get any log out user visible hint at all of why start sshd just hangs there forever.
no matter how bad init hacks were, nothing was this shitty. zero logs. zero hints. just wait there forever.
if you like systemd, it just means you're sheltered and too green.
Says the green name.
People can like whatever, but most of the time people like sysvinit less than systemd init.
No, they are not just as bad. The scenario you describe is obviously broken, but the entire system can be inspected and easily debugged. With a flick of the wrist you can at your leisure summon a graph of the entire known universe. If you only have LAN then, typically, your host is physically accessible so this should be easy to debug.
Nothing about the scenario you describe is inherently worse because of systemd. The same scenario with sysvinit is literally a nightmare. This is literally and practically infinitely less of a head scratcher with systemd than anything else in existence.
I'm not sure how anyone can defend sysvinit -- you're certainly not even trying -- but shitting on systemd because you had a bad time is about the least productive way to participate here. It's no one's fault but your own if you don't understand your tools or the ramifications of letting yourself use them in ignorance.
Besides, at least at the time of this comment, your username is the one that is literally green.
I suspect X servers will die out at some point, but you could probably just run XWayland right? I've not messed with Wayland yet, because it doesn't address my use cases (mythtv frontends which is one X program with no window manager, and running programs on freebsd/linux for display on Windows).