And I have an old laptop and a virtual installation on a Windows
laptop, both on sysvinit. But both exist for a small set of purposes,
and have nothing like the range of software on my workstation, so I
don't know what they tell us. They also only get upgraded occasionally,
so they may already be dead computers walking...
I think the real issue is that nobody likes maintaining sysvinit
scripts. It's quite right that the job of running a piece of software
should be the responsibility of the upstream software writers, not the
distribution package maintainer, but the very existence of nasty
complicated sysvinit scripts surely means that systemd must somehow
accomplish the same things.
If some of the complications of the init script could be pushed back
into the application code, I'd have thought that would have been done
long ago. Conversely, if a few systemd functions can replace the init
script, then surely the script was over-complicated to start with. And
if the widespread use of systemd elsewhere means that upstream writers
*have* to take on much of the job that an init script used to do, the
init script could be greatly simplified, in some cases to a generic one.