Hi guys,

I spoke briefly to a sys admin friend of mine who told me you just have to understand how it works...?

can somebody just break down for me the most important things we should know about systemd and how we can drill it

any info appreciated

You're going to get a lot of varied answers depending on the slant of each responder. I'd first recommend you just perform a general web search using the terms "systemd overview" and read some of the hits.

The way I'm learning systemd is by being stuck using it. Places where I have to go "What's this stupid jounalctl, or netctl?!?"

Each of those are top level systemd controls which administer the journal (logs) or the network services. There are things like enable and disable of services, and there are services which are usually scripts with links that are made to them (enable), versus not (disable) and descriptor files which configure how any given service is supposed to be run, what it depends on, when it should be attempted to run, and how persistent it should be if it happens to be stopped or fails at some point.

Learn by doing, but review some of the information on it so you don't just enter into things blindly.

@rtmistler: AFAIK, netctl is not a systemd tool, but an Arch Linux specific tool to manage network profiles.

@sigint-ninja: Start here: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/
On a "normal" desktop machine you will mostly use systemctl and journalctl, but timedatectl and hostnamectl may also be useful. If you work with containers and virtual machines you might want to look at machinectl also. Any of these tools (and their respective configuration and unit file formats) comes with extensive man-pages. The Arch Wiki also provides a whole bunch of information about configuring your system with system and using its tools.
I won't write a tutorial here, but if you have any specific questions after reading the Wiki articles/man-pages I will be happy to answer them here, if I can.

Ha-ha! You know I did get that mis-impression because I've been working a bit wtih Arch lately.

I like the Arch Linux wiki page on systemd (most Arch Linux wiki pages are very good anyway):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd

The first section Basic systemd usage may suffice.

thanks guys

TobiSGD will do some reading and post some questions...im sure