It depends on the parts you want to cut. For example, without systemd journal system. Good luck reading any log files. Almost every other UNIX service is capable of writing logs in text which can be read with any editor or tooled with any shell script.
The whole point about the journal is to make it easy to pull out just the information you want, without having to read/parse the whole thing. You can filter entries by service name, date range etc. And output in JSON, if you want.
It is annoying to have to "learn how to read logs" but once you do, it actually can be pretty handy. I just don't need to do it often enough to remember each time.
Which is where myth 20 comes in: while you cannot build systemd without journald, that doesn’t stop you continuing to feed logs to syslog. You don’t have to keep any existing logs in the journal, if you don’t want.
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