For adding a quick thing to make something happen at a specific time, I can add a cron job in a couple of minutes. To add a timer takes creating a couple of files with syntax that took me a while to look up last time I needed it, and running a command. Then debugging. Sure, the timer has benefits, but cron jobs are still simpler.

On the bright side, there’s actually a “crontab -t” command that apparently can be used to generate timer files from a crontab line, which I hadn’t known of before today.

Systemd is fine, but we should be aiming for better than fine.

That being said., there’s definitely something to be said for sticking with “fine” until something else proves itself to be at least adequate with potential to be better than merely fine.

As someone who’s created a timer, cron is much more straightforward.

Systemd has its good points, but most of that is the core functionality as a sysvinit replacement in my opinion. And it’s entirely likely that at least one of the newer alternatives is a better option for that.