Working with systemd timers - Dmitry Kudryavtsev

Have you read the article? The fourth paragraph lists improvements systemd timers bring over cron:

Cron is easy, very simple and robust mechanism to execute periodic tasks on a *nix server, and is available by default on all popular Linux distributions. However, cron suffers from some issues:

• If the system is down when the cron needs to run, the cron will be missed
• There is no built-in status monitoring
• There are no built-in logs
• If you want to execute pre/post commands (for example by pinging an external service for success/failure) you have to do it inside the script itself

All of these issues are addressed with systemd services and timers, as the authors explains in details.

cron is quite inadequate for condition based scheduling. Instead of million obscure ways to achieve this inside the command that cron executes, systemd timers give us a standard ONE way to do things.

I feel like systemd timers follow unix philosophy better than cron at this day and age.