Even systems that use text logs, compress logs using logrotate and you have to uncompress before you can read them. Also since the compressed tar.gz logs are a bunch of separate files, if you don’t have an exact date of what you’re looking for, you have to uncompress and search through all of them. I much prefer just using journalctl
It’s not the binary. It’s that the logs it writes are in binary so can’t be read without a program.
Even systems that use text logs, compress logs using logrotate and you have to uncompress before you can read them. Also since the compressed tar.gz logs are a bunch of separate files, if you don’t have an exact date of what you’re looking for, you have to uncompress and search through all of them. I much prefer just using journalctl
You can’t read a text file without a program either.