Any specific issues? I didn’t see any. No offense. One factor may be that Arch prioritizes not patching upstream - helped save them from targeting here, and it doesn’t go overboard with default configs, which I’ve long appreciated.
Not to distro-war, I’m very grateful for Debian. My background is finding Linux in the mid-00s and breaking many SuSE, Ubuntu, and one or two Debian systems before finding something I could understand, repair, and maintain in 2008 Arch.
systemd accentuated its ability to stay relevant with enterprise Linux, made it even easier to package for, and has been a useful tool in diagnosing service issues and managing bad software for me.
I’m not sure how often it’s posted here but Benno Rice formerly of FreeBSD Core Team has an excellent and amusing discussion of systemd’s technical merits.
IMO he makes a couple good points (and a couple poor ones), but it’s about everything except technical merits. It’s more about social and philosophical aspects.
Even if Debian wasn't perfect before systemd was introduced, at least I knew there was a very high probability that I could trust it to function well.
That stopped being the case after systemd was introduced. I've had far too many problems caused by systemd, to the point where all trust I had in newer versions of Debian has been lost.
Initially, I thought that maybe the problem was with me. But as I investigated the issues I was having with systemd, I'd see so many other bug reports, forum postings, mailing list postings, IRC logs, blog articles, and other online communications from people who were also having many other problems with systemd.
Debian offered a much better user experience before it switched to systemd, and a much worse user experience since.