I wrote and maintained a lot of sysvinit scripts and I fucking hated them. I wrote Upstart scripts and I fucking hated them. I wrote OpenRC scripts and I fucking hated them. Any init system that relies on one of the worst languages in common use nowadays can fuck right off. Systemd units are well documented, consistent, and reliable.

From my 30 seconds of looking, I actually like nitro a bit more than OpenRC or Upstart. It does seem like it’d struggle with daemons the way sysvinit scripts used to. Like, you have to write a process supervisor to track when your daemonized process dies so that it can then die and tell nitro (which is, ofc, a process supervisor), and it looks like the logging might be trickier in that case too. I fucking hate services that background themselves, but they do exist and systemd does a great job at handling those. It also doesn’t do any form of dependency management AFAICT, which is a more serious flaw.

Nitro seems like a good option for some use cases (although I cannot conceive why you’d want to run a service manager in a container when docker and k8s have robust service management built into them), but it’s never touching the disk on any of the tens of thousands of boxes I help administrate. systemd is just too good.