In a funny way, you've just proven my point. I'm talking about a whole class of problems caused by systemd's design, and you've provided a case-specific hack which happens to work in one instance I picked, leaving every other case where I might want to opt out of part of what systemd provides unsupported.

Have you ever noticed that it's really hard to replace the IP stack in Linux with the one from FreeBSD? Clearly that proves that Linux never followed the UNIX philosophy in the first place and we should never have switched away from MINIX.

that seems unfair - on one hand, there are people complaining that systemd is too monolithic... on the other hand, we have people saying there are too many components !

Come on, this horse has been beaten to death already...

I'll just say, a GNU/Linux distro has many components, but they're not monolithic because they integrate well, you can do ls|grep etc, you know this. But if we want to change one component of systemd, we can't do it! You see? A lot of components, but they comprise a blob and can't be separated or used individually.