I used to be a pretty standard one-monitor-one-terminal sort of guy up until I installed xmonad on a lark one afternoon some years ago now. Why xmonad? Because haskell, which to someone who comes from a C and COBOL background, seemed like awfully futuristic space magic. Anyway... > I'm not a pro, and I would rather prefer a team of pros doing this The problem with putting trust in the so-called professionals is that the truck number goes down and the whole enterprise becomes institutionally fragile. Just remember that where open-source is concerned, they're not really capable of doing anything you aren't. > "go with systemd it's the future!" If you find yourself in any sort of sysadmin type position, then I'd say that it pays to understand it if only for the reason that one might encounter it in a professional capacity. As for one's own systems, that comes down to how one wants them configured, and how much effort one is willing to put into maintaining that. One of the big draws of the *nix world is that things are modular and easy enough to replace, and that you're rarely stuck with one solution to a problem. Even systemd, for all of its deep integration with other things, can be carved out and replaced. Alternatives will remain as long as people see fit to maintain them. I think the big reason we're seeing systemd itself become so popular as of late, is that it's the big corporate-backed solution to parallelizing init, largely for the popular-conciousness marketability factor of low boot times. Looks good on the promotional materials, but it is still a specific optimisation for a specific use case. Personal anecdote: I couldn't possibly care less about boot times. My machine spends over twenty minutes training RAM when it POSTs anyway. An extra minute or two to load the OS is meaningless to the man who's outside having coffee.