Is it that weird that if you want to run a job in the background outside your session that ask your service manager to spawn the job?

I mean all of this is just a difference of opinion between, "I want a process supervisor to manage all my background jobs" and "I just want to double fork and throw processes at init."

It is the default.

This behavior is controlled by the KillUserProcesses= setting in logind.conf, and the previous default of "no" is now changed to "yes".

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/2d4f8cf467b6825c9127...

Switching to CentOS in order to use screen is not an appealing option, and the config appears not to work on my current distro (that might be my poor testing, but it's certainly not the default anyhow.)

I understand Slackware still lacks systemd, so maybe that's a better choice for me :)

The box in question is in use as a media server, but reloading logind logs out the X session, so it wasn't really possible to test properly until today. Having the opportunity to restart the machine (probably I just needed to systemctl daemon-reload?) the "don't kill my processes bro" options are working.

The distro is kde neon.

The point isn't that I can't (or the distro maintainers can't) get it to work, the point is that the aggressive systemd default breaks established practice, and that this is typical systemd behaviour: arrogant and uncaring. IOW user-hostile in the fullest sense of the term. It's not like this is an isolated example.