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What's your current pet #peeve with #systemd, you ask? [1]
Well, one of the oldest #complaints about it is its #stupid binary #logging system. "Instead of paging your way through /var/log/messages, just run journalctl !" they say.
But if you run #journalctl, it'll start at the beginning of the log. For this machine, that's a few months ago. I want to get to "now", so hit `G` ... and wait for literally *minutes* for it to parse through the whole bloody thing.
1/x
[1] You didn't ask.
Open /var/log/messages with `less`, hit `G` - basically instantaneous. All of that overhead is journalctl having to parse its stupid binary logs and turn them back into readable text to feed to its pager. As a side note, the sane thing would be if journalctl was using `less` as its pager, but it would surprise me not even a little bit to hear that they wrote their own and now that's part of the systemd suite.
"Oh, but you can pre-filter based on unit" or on time or whatever - nope.
2/x
Sometimes you just don't know what you're looking for. You shouldn't need to use features like that just to avoid the insufferable slowness of a tool that replaced a perfectly usable, fast tool.
systemd stans can block me now.
3/3
@cazabon the problem is that /var/log/messages no longer exists on some distributions 
Indeed - that's one of the reasons this is such an annoyance. I'm pretty sure systemd can be configured to also log to /var/log/messages, or maybe you get that by installing another package. I haven't looked too hard to find out.