You Don't Love systemd Timers Enough

Figure 1: Plato's Cave by Jan Pietersz Saenredam; 24 hour clock licensed under CC3 from Wikimedia; systemd logo by the systemd project licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 My favorite metonymic technology term is "cron job": even though cron may not literally be the daemon that executes actions on a schedule, we apply the term to anything that walks like a cron and quacks like a cron. As Patrick McKenzie likes to point out, cron jobs are one of the most eminently useful computing primitives. They offer utility that's almost immediately obvious for plenty of use cases that almost everybody has: do this every day; do that once a month. And yet. You probably shouldn't use literal cron (or its more modern cousins) for scheduled tasks! In 2026 there are more modern options available, and my favorite is the humble systemd timer. I love systemd timers. If you don't love them yet, maybe I can show you the reasons why you should love them, too. My cron? Cooked? A systemd timer is a type of unit that…