Right, managed to get a network connection on my laptop while I'm away. I did an out-of-band sync so you folks wouldn't have to wait until tonight. Should be sorted now. Thanks @Staudey for the fix ❤️

elfprince For all its hiccups it is bar none the best service, device, boot, etc. orchestration system on Linux (service management is just a small part). I wouldn't want to replace it with inferior options like runit OpenRC or regress to the days of Upstart and SysVInit.

      Woke up this morning and ran the updates. They worked as expected and boot times are back to normal 👍️
      Thanks everyone!

      When reporting the issue to systemd I almost thought that I was the only user affected and it was something incredibly specific about my setup. Glad that the fix also helped some other people.

        JoshStrobl Wow, I wasn't aware that you had such a high opinion of systemd. All this time I've read that distros are just 'putting up with it', and simply going with the flow (ie following the example of the major distros). I trust your (and other devs) technical expertise, and will relax (a little) about it. 😁