Even when my personal opinion on systemd is a bit skeptical regarding some of its components, it is undeniable that in the mid-term the main GNU/Linux distributions will be shipping it (or parts of it), and with Fedora having already adopted, it is just a matter of time before GNOME (as in “GNOME OS”) starts using it. So, for getting acquainted with it, I have installed it following the corresponding Arch Wiki page and started reading documentation. This article is mainly a compilation to remind myself about where to easily reach the relevant information, but it may still be useful to the people out there so I here it goes.

Lennart Poettering (main developer of the thing) has a “systemd for administrators” series of blog posts (thirteen articles so far):

1. Verifying bootup
2. Which service owns which processes?
3. How do I convert a SysV init script to a systemd service file?
4. Killing services
5. The three levels of “off” (aka how to disable services)
6. Changing roots (aka chroot()ing services)
7. The Blame Game (aka determining which services are slowing down the boot process)
8. The new configuration files (contains interesting notes for third party packages)
9. On /etc/sysconfig and /etc/default (this is more like an opinion column, but interesting nevertheless)
10. Instantiated services (aka service templates, like the multiple virtual console services)
11. Converting inetd services
12. Securing your services (aka how to restrict what services can do to harden them)
13. Log and service status
14. The self-explanatory boot (aka how unit files —services, etc— can provide hints to documentation in them)
15. Watchdogs

Here you can find a list with links to the manual pages and some more documentation. For newcomers, I would totally recommend reading the FAQ and the Tips & Tricks pages.