> I manage this with clever usage of grep. You are correct in that there isn't a single --flag that will only show me those specifics.
I can grep my way through text logs as well but being able to get logs for different purposes using --flags is better user experience. I can always resort to to using grep, sed, and awk if I want to when using journald but the loss of these quality of life features make it hard for me to consider using a distro that does not have systemd.
> But let’s add the advantages of this logging: systemd can log events from the very start of the boot process, which was not possible before.
From what I've seen using Alpine Linux for a few weeks on my Raspberry Pi, logs are written to /var/log/messages after the init process starts and launches the logging service. All logs before the init starts can be retrieved using dmesg? I'm not sure about this though, let me know if I'm wrong.
One of the things I haven't figured out yet is if traditional logging systems can easily do advanced log filtering like showing only logs from the current boot (like -b in systemd), previous boots (-b -1), and showing logs after a specific date and time (--since).
Unfortunately, the ecosystem of a tool matters more than the tool itself. One could come up with a technically superior alternative to an existing tool (gpg vs age and signify) but unless they have a widely recognised ecosystem, they tend to remain relatively niche products.
For example, Git can sign commits using gpg and x509 and now in version 2.34, OpenSSH keys. Although OpenSSH can be used to sign data, signify is a much better tool for this task.
I can grep my way through text logs as well but being able to get logs for different purposes using --flags is better user experience. I can always resort to to using grep, sed, and awk if I want to when using journald but the loss of these quality of life features make it hard for me to consider using a distro that does not have systemd.