I’m a beginner to intermediate level home desktop user of Linux. I think I represent a small or at least low priority class of people with complaints, but for me it’s that it’s been confusing to learn how the distro is glued together.

I find sometimes things are handled in pre-systemd ways, sometimes with systemd, and sometimes custom scripts. Basically it is mentally hard having something on the system that duplicates functionality and not knowing which I should use to not clash with the vision of the distro maintainers.

Actually this is really a complaint about distro documentation not systemd. If you know of any documentation about the design decisions behind any major distro, I’m interested. Not forums where people piece together how to fix things, or wikis that document findings on how things behave in a distro. Something from the maintainers like, “Here’s are the scripts we added that are above/beyond the base distro (if Debian based) or above/beyond POSIX”. The only place I’ve seen this is Linux From Scratch.