Although systemd has been the object of many controversies, to the point the some distributions were forked just to get rid of it (see Devuan, a fork of Debian which, by default, replaces systemd with sysvinit), in the end it has become the de-facto stand

Now we can see how systemd implements the bootstrap. systemd is run by the kernel as a result of /sbin/init being symbolically linked to /lib/systemd/systemd. It runs the default target, default.target , which is always a link to a desired target such as

Red Hat is the inventor and primary booster of systemd, so the best distros for playing with it are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux, and of course good ole Fedora Linux, which always ships with the latest, greatest,