

At its core, SystemD coordinates and launches all the services in your operating system. So, it is essential for the boot process, but also does scheduling, meaning you could run a backup script every night with it, for example.
That’s the simple answer. But in truth, SystemD is often criticized for doing too much, so it’s hard to describe what it really does. For example, you can also manage network interfaces via SystemD.
Kind of the goal of SystemD is to provide common plumbing which works the same across distros, so that when you configure your services or network interfaces etc. on Ubuntu, it works the same as on openSUSE or Arch or whatever.









Yeah, it reads like they wanted to make that reality show and then just slapped a random franchise on it for PR reasons.