I am one of the happy Gentoo users, who have escaped from systemd until now.

Some years ago I have experimented with systemd for a month, by using Arch Linux. However I have encountered an ugly bug and eventually I wiped it out.

The problem was not that there was a bug, I assume that the bug must have been solved years ago. The problem was that the bug was not something that could be attributed to a random error, like a cut-and-paste error when editing. It was a bug that in my opinion demonstrated extremely poor judgment in the overall software system design. Thus I considered that the bug was too outrageous and I blacklisted systemd.

(The bug consisted in that the computer, could fail to shutdown, randomly, due to a race condition regarding messages sent on D-Bus, messages that were generated for some reason by systemd while shutting down, when the recipient of a certain message could have been killed before receiving the last message intended for it, or the D-Bus daemon could have been killed before the last attempt of a message transmission, which resulted in a stall. The fact that sending and receiving messages on D-Bus was necessary for being able to complete a shutdown, was in itself a proof of stupidity. In decades of using computers, from IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputers, until the latest computers of today, only with systemd I have seen a case when shutting down a computer could fail. Moreover, even when successful, shutdown was very slow, unlike the instant shutdown with which I am accustomed. For decades my computers have been optimized to boot in a few seconds, by using custom kernels, so the supposed fast boot of systemd had not brought any improvement in my case, while the shutdown was degraded.)

That's funny, because I've been converting all of my Gentoo systems to systemd... from my point of view, the writing is on the wall, most distros use systemd already, so there's no sense in not learning it.