In general, the more I learn about systemd’s features, and the more functionality I migrate, the more I appreciate the project. It really does provide wonderfully flexible facilities for managing processes in a way that gets most things right.
However there are a few warts, and at least one feature that I just don’t really see any benefit to using over the traditional approach: timers. They seem to add a lot of overhead and ceremony over what plain old cron requires, for little to no benefit (at least for my use-cases so far). Am I missing something?
Now, I freely admit there’s a bit of Cunningham’s Law/XKCD 386-bait going on here with this post, and that I’m hoping more enlightened users will let me know about all the brilliant benefits I’m not yet taking advantage of. But from my vantage point, a one-line crontab entry feels a lot more straightforward than defining a timer and a unit (in separate files!) to achieve the same effect.
