Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd

https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/

by todsacerdoti • 1 year ago

76 123 1 year ago

blogs.gnome.org

The fact that the next blog post (linked at the bottom of the article) is titled "a desktop for all" is deliciously ironic in context.

sph3• 1 year ago

For all in this context does not mean “all the infinite combinations of software for people that refuse to adopt the status quo”

systemd is here to stay. It is ludicrous to imagine everybody to keep supporting that 1% that is ideologically opposed to it, no? As those people love to say, open-source is written by volunteers, you can always fork it.

SpecialistK2• 1 year ago

What about the (admittedly small) % of operating systems that can't support systemd, like FreeBSD? systemd is pretty heavily dependent on Linux, and that's not an ideological thing.

petepete3• 1 year ago

This is a good move. Without having endless resources keeping the codebase small and focused just makes sense.

I know it's going to be painful for non-Linux users but volunteer devs can't be expected to cover all bases.

yolkedgeek2• 1 year ago

They do have endless resources. They are an IBM company. If people choose to work for IBM without getting payed, that's kind of their problem.

xtoilette• 1 year ago

gnome is an IBM company?

msgodel6• 1 year ago

Keeping the codebase small and focused makes sense

LMFAO. You have not even glanced at insane dumpster fire that is the gnome codebase.

petepete3• 1 year ago

Regardless of what it's currently like, supporting fewer things is going to make it easier to maintain.

hnlmorg2• 1 year ago

What is Gnomes market share like these days?

It used to be the de facto FOSS desktop in the GNOME 2.x days but things changed with the release of Gnome 3 and I’ve not really noticed Gnome ever bounce back since.

shmerl• 1 year ago

KDE is commonly more popular among gamers it seems.

forvelin• 1 year ago

who does even compete with Gnome ? it is the de facto default desktop in almost all notable distros.

it just works, though it is far less customizable compared to KDE, it is far more stable -still only compared to KDE..

flohofwoe• 1 year ago

it is far more stable -still only compared to KDE

Citation needed ;) I haven't seen any 'instability' in KDE since I switched from GNOME, and performance/snappiness of KDE is actually better.

wizee• 1 year ago

KDE 6 is quite stable in my experience and faster/more efficient than Gnome too.

tpxl• 1 year ago

it just works

For some definition of works, like a folder with 300 videos loading for 15 seconds and image viewer unable to open 150MB images.

I prefer how Gnome works compared to KDE, but I can't get past the ridiculous performance issues.

criticalfault• 1 year ago

Every time there is an interview of some startup and they show the offices with a glimpse of a monitor, it's always Ubuntu. Running gnome.

Also a few people I know, if they used Linux on a desktop it was Ubuntu.

Don't know anyone using KDE, steam deck being the only exception.

So from a personal perspective, if it's Linux on the desktop, it's gnome.

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

KDE is quite popular for personal computers I believe. It's got things like HDR support much earlier than Gnome did.

Corporate also seems to like OpenSUSE and RHEL. Universities seem to like Debian. Practically all of them default to Gnome or offer Gnome equivalently.

Even several (relatively) big SteamOS-alikes are using Gnome despite SteamOS itself defaulting to KDE.

esseph4• 1 year ago

It's the default DE for RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and many others.

cristodcgomez• 1 year ago

I just registered for comment here: they always refused to admit it (by "they" I mean Fedora/IBM) but we will end up having a Gnome OS for the general public... And I'm afraid the 3E rule is starting to be applied (Extended already, Embraced in all the "other OS" and now...)

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

Gnome maintains an OS for developers and such: https://os.gnome.org/

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is basically a Gnome OS already. So is Ubuntu. Though both come in KDE flavour and a bunch of others too.

I don't see what's wrong with Red Hat spending development time for "only" one single desktop environment.

bjourne2• 1 year ago

This is the back-end plague which is everywhere in free software. The idea is that whatever "it" is, adding support for "it" is "just another back-end" . Take cairo for example, it has or had back-ends for gdk, win32, png, svg, html canvas, pdf, postscript, opengl, xlib, quartz, etc. Only a few of them are actually usable and support has been removed for several others over the years. The number of sound back-ends on Linux is uncountable: ALSA, OSS, OpenAl, PulseAudio, Jack, Esound, PipeWire... It's never "just another back-end" because every back-end needs continuous testing and maintenance.

Poettering when designing systemd wisely, WISELY decided to not go the back-end route. Other free software hackers learn the hard way that multiple back-ends are expensive and rarely worth the cost.

imtringued• 1 year ago

The problem is that everyone is doing their own thing instead of coming up with a common standard. That's kinda why Wayland is so hated.

What people seem to be misunderstanding about systemd is that it is not encroaching and forcing itself upon distros. It's the opposite. It's solving problems faster than anyone else and thereby wins by default. If there was a competing project that did the same things systemd did (the problem is that you need a whole collection of projects that are poorly integrated with each other), then you could start talking about standardizing things, but as of right now, systemd is spiritually the new Xorg of Linux.

sph3• 1 year ago

The problem is that everyone is doing their own thing instead of coming up with a common standard

I mean, there is a reason XKCD 927 is the most quoted to the point of attracting downvotes. It's pure cliché, so I wonder why you believe a common standard to rule them all is possible.

There is only one sane approach in software: opinionated configuration. Yet the free-software world somehow still clings to the utopia of multiple, freely interchangeable choices, and all you get is half a dozen unmaintained backends and just one that actually works for a number of years when someone forgets 927 and decides to reinvent the wheel, badly.

n3storm2• 1 year ago

For all worried check out xfce. It works, is light, is customizable, has gtk responsiveness (I find Qt click and drag and drop downs odd) Only downside maybe is no Wayland support yet.

n2h42• 1 year ago

with 4.20, there is experimental wayland support for almost all xfce4 applications. I've used it and didn't even face a single crash.

So, it's not far away.

n3storm2• 1 year ago

great! Do you feel is a "good" change? does using a DE with wayland feels better or different? not talking about technical advantages...

oneshtein• 1 year ago

Mate supports Wayland since Mate 1.28.

See https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/developers-corner/wayland-meso...

Quote:

One of the most notable improvements is the enhanced support for Wayland, bringing us closer to a fully native MATE-Wayland experience. Several components have been updated to work seamlessly with Wayland, ensuring a more integrated and responsive desktop environment.

airhangerf152• 1 year ago

no Wayland support yet

That's not a downside.

ihatepoop1234• 1 year ago

My hardware doesn't work with X. Screen tearing. So im stuck with wayland, although I'd like to move to xfce when they support wayland

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

Just rename Gnome to systemd-desktop and be done with it.

haileys• 1 year ago

This is a sensible move. systemd is a good piece of software, and foundational Linux infrastructure which by now is very widely deployed.

I’ve been doing Linux a long time and my experience is that systemd is much more pleasant to work with than the brittle duct tape and shell script stuff which came before.

pcpuser5• 1 year ago

Agreed. I wonder how many people in this thread hating on systemd have actually tried to work with upstream. They are an extremely pleasant and welcoming community who are willing to work with you on the most trivial stuff.

pseudalopex• 1 year ago

systemd maintainers were extremely unpleasant, unwelcoming, and unwilling to work with others in my experience.

guilhas3• 1 year ago

Xorg was also a "good piece of software, foundational Linux infrastructure and very wildly deployed"

jononor• 1 year ago

Still is?

greatgib2• 1 year ago

Systemd is crap. Works in the main use case, mess up otherwise. It is the windows kernel of linux distributions.

Here for example, suddenly systemd will be mandatory despite systemd not caring for multiple session of a single user. Not only not yet implemented but totally that don't need it personally so no one can want to have it. And so again the capability of our linux based distribution will be restricted for something that was just working for decades.

Again, we can also notice how systemd people try to force systemd usage down or throats by making it mandatory for core parts like the login. Where it is not the responsibility of the initsystem to deal with that (except in windows) and if the thing was not a damned crap, it would be easy to switch to alternatives with clear interfaces.

calcifer• 1 year ago

Where it is not the responsibility of the initsystem

systemd is not an init system. It's an umbrella project with many distinct tools and services, only one of which is an init provider.

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

systemd is far from perfect, but it's the best we've got on Linux. Treating systemd like an init system is like treating your car like a Bluetooth speaker: yes, you can connect your phone to the speaker system over bluetooth and yes you can take the speakers with you to most places, but the speakers are only a small part of what you're taking along with you

Nobody is forcing systemd down anyone's throats. You can use init.d if you like, or OpenRC, or whatever you prefer. What's happening instead is that people who maintain software are no longer interested in maintaing init.d scripts or working around the missing features many supposed alternatives lack.

netsharc• 1 year ago

It's more comparable to the Windows Registry.. (well ok the registry isn't also dozens of daemons that run everything...)

sph3• 1 year ago

I have yet to hear an argument against systemd which isn’t a variation of:

- """bloat"""

- I dislike Poettering. Remember pulseaudio?

- a core user-space layer for modern applications that can’t only rely on the spartan kernel syscall API? Literally 1984.

Given that systemd is good enough and is running on 99% of desktops and servers, I always find it hilarious to see how the vocal minority is overrepresented on this forum.

msgodel6• 1 year ago

There aren't decent Pro systemd arguments other than "the Linux API confused me" and sysv init (which no one argues is good) was bad.

Personally the last system I had systemd on corrupted my package database after killing apt that I was running in tmux. "Oh you can fix that with xyz systemd configuration." Here's my response:

Kindly shove it up your ass and quit moving things around all the time just because you're board.

Also if "it's good enough for most people" is a decent argument then you should be on Windows.

bjourne2• 1 year ago

The pro argument is that writing shell scripts for starting/restarting/enabling/disabling/stopping is total garbage. Not to mention having to manage lock files. systemd units are not perfect, but they are a billion times better than the crap we used to deal with.

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

The pro part is the massive simplification and security advantages systemd brings to plain and simple config files. Sure, I can reimplement the containerisation API in OpenRC if I stack enough helper binaries and shell script libraries in there, but I don't want to. Kindly shove it up your ass and quit moving things around all the time just because you're board.

If it's good enough for most people, that means it's good enough to use as a basis for development. The same way no company develops mobile apps for Phosh or Plasma Mobile: the tiny fraction of people who have more esoteric preferences aren't worth rewriting the software stack for. Those who don't like the status quo can write their own wrappers and hacks if they want to use your software.

justinrubek2• 1 year ago

Honestly this sounds like an apt problem. A properly robust package management system shouldn't be able to succumb to such a problem.

Your abrasiveness is not helping discussion. I'm also not a board.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I always find it hilarious to see how the vocal minority is overrepresented on this forum.

Those who oppose the norm are usually a lot more vocal than the people who support it, or just don't care. This is why you get bathtub curves in ratings - you can bet the low ratings are over-represented in comparison with the meh and the praise.

adrian_b5• 1 year ago

I believe that the opposite applies.

I have yet to hear any argument pro systemd that is valid.

As long as the systemd supporters cannot explain its advantages, there is no reason for anybody else to replace their good systems that work fine without systemd, with systems using systemd.

In practice, systemd has been imposed by force. The developers of a few packages, like GNOME, have introduced dependencies upon systemd. Then the maintainers of the major Linux distributions have considered that such packages cannot be removed from their distribution, therefore they must base it on systemd.

Then the users have discovered when upgrading their computers that they must either migrate to systemd or stay with their ancient program versions.

This is how systemd has propagated. In no place there was any analysis about technical advantages and any attempt to find an optimal solution by consensus.

CoolCold• 1 year ago

As long as the systemd supporters cannot explain its advantages, there is no reason for anybody else to replace their good systems that work fine without systemd, with systems using systemd.

Assuming you know what systemd as init system able to do, I'm not sure what extra information you need for getting list of advantages.

If you going with examples is better for you, i'll mention couple of mine - note that I likely forget some other good samples as it's so natural so I'm may be not realizing it's systemd's feature, just "how things work"

* hardening - syscall filtering, privilege limiting, read/write path filtering, per-unit tmp files. As nice example, I have great peace of mind when I put php-fpm into network isolated to localhost only for IP level

* resource management and resource information at all - observing resource usage by multiple units when needed with a quick way saves my time, in addition to being able to collect such metrics into monitoring. Setting the lowest IO priority for backup scripts and even MB/sec per block device - godsend. Limits on CPU usage or RAM usage where needed ensures smooth operations of the fleet without nasty surprises

* things like quick overview with systemctl --failed, user-level units instead of flacky @reboot in crontab (yeah, we still remember it from eggdrop/psybnc days)

* clear and uniform way to work with services across the team, no hacky bash scripts with saving PIDs

so on.

Probably you do system administration for your servers in some other way that all that goodies are not noticeable for you and your team.

jabiko• 1 year ago

I think this is a good move: it focuses on maintaining a single, well-tested code path while still offering guidance for those who want alternatives (see the section "So what should distros without systemd do?" in the article).

It's not making it impossible to run GNOME on non-systemd systems, but it shifts the responsibility of maintaining that support to the projects that are actually interested in it. I think ultimately this might lead to a better user experience since the people developing non-systemd support are also the ones using it.

pona-a5• 1 year ago

Replying to some sibling comments asking why anyone wouldn't want to use systemd.

People want to understand their software as well as it's practically possible. It's not an uncommon preference; worse-is-better was quite successful for a reason. As systemd stands, it's an unauditable mess of tightly-coupled components built to handle any conceivable need. These features create new attack vectors: for instance, systemd-machined credential passing system, which can inject arbitrary files such as keys and configs into the guest, also runs on bare metal. And some are just running a musl system that can't even use systemd.

Some might look at the old SysV init scripts through rose-tinted glasses, but I don't think it represents the current state of the community. We have the modern OpenRC with parallel startup, dependency-based initialization, supervision, network management, and cgroups; dinit, which tries to imitate the 80% of systemd features that people use with 20% of its footprint; s6 with its supervision trees; runit that just works; and GNU Shepherd, which gives you an entire Scheme interpreter to configure your system.

Monocultures are bad because they eliminate competitive pressure for good design and create single points of failure that affect everyone. systemd was an excellent addition to the ecosystem in its day, but has become uncomfortably sticky: you can't just choose to replace systemd; you'll need to reimplement udevd, logind, D-Bus activation interfaces, and now userdb, all of which have their own subtle quirks you'll need to replicate. Look to the state of mdev or elogind and you'll see why it's not a sustainable compromise.

probably_wrong• 1 year ago

Monocultures are bad because they eliminate competitive pressure for good design and create single points of failure that affect everyone.

For a practical example of this, the XZ backdoor [1] affected liblzma which is (was?) a dependency for libsystemd, and some distributions patched OpenSSH to include libsystemd. As a result, the decision of putting journal file compression functionality directly into your init system means that a significant portion of all Linux systems out there came this close to being backdoored.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911311

esseph4• 1 year ago

If you think that's wild you should hear about kernel vulnerabilities!

Spivak2• 1 year ago

This wasn't a systemd problem— this was distro maintainers doing something stupid problem. The thing the maintainers wanted to patch into OpenSSH was systemd-notify which is the way services can tell systemd that they're ready. The protocol is literally sending the string READY=1 over a file descriptor. libsystemd contains a reference implementation but it's a protocol specifically for the reason that every service isn't supposed to link to libsystemd. Maintainers thought it was easier to link in all of libsystemd (and therefore xz) into OpenSSH just for the sd_notify function.

Just link in a huge library into security critical code, what could go wrong?!

growse2• 1 year ago

Replying to some sibling comments asking why anyone wouldn't want to use systemd.

I get why some people don't want to use systemd. That's fine.

I really don't understand why this group of people are so passionate about broadcasting this opinion to anyone within earshot. They don't like a piece of software, great! They've got different values! Use something else!

pona-a5• 1 year ago

I think you're missing the point. This is a thread about GNOME, a major desktop environment, declaring systemd-userdb as a necessary requirement for its future version, asking the non-systemd community to provide an API-compatible implementation if they want to keep using GNOME.

I personally do not use GNOME, nor am I running a non-systemd system at the moment. This is the first time I wrote a single word about systemd vs other inits on the internet, explicitly because it couldn't be more on-topic.

It's a common false compromise to say you now depend on a component but welcome alternative implementations. In reality, this quickly becomes treadmill for their maintainers, forced to adapt to its quirks so the dependent software even has a chance of working. You can read more about eudev as a more notable example of that dynamic. Projects like Wayland avoid it by having a committee of major implementations vote on proposed specs.

pcpuser5• 1 year ago

There's so much I disagree with in the beginning but the ending is what actually grinds my gears. You make it sound like systemd manufactured this monoculture somehow. This is also the point I've seen people throw in a comparison to some closed-source org with money to burn and questionable morals.

Systemd was chosen by distros and users across different communities because it solves hard problems better than the others. We can debate about why that is, but the maintainers of Systemd aren't running smear campaigns against other open source projects. Often systemd is the subject of such ire.

They chose to solve hard problems and people adopted it. It's not anything more sinister. It's definitely not an "un-auditable mess". It's written in well formatted C with structure, good tooling, and an open community. You can disagree with the ideology but that's open source for you.

Additionally and away from my point, I believe that Systemd won our because they chose to embrace some complexity to solve really hard problems. Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialisation by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.

msgodel6• 1 year ago

All of us paying attention saw how the systemd authors shopped their stuff around issue trackers and mailing lists telling everyone "it's just the way it is now." They absolutely did manufacture the situation. They pushed hard enough doing this that it's resulted in multiple large distros being forked by groups of former maintainers.

gatlin5• 1 year ago

good tooling

My completely oblique, binary logs disagree. It won because it solved problems companies with money needed solved. There is no indication that it succeeded on merit.

pona-a5• 1 year ago

I believe you are making assumptions about my beliefs that don't follow from what I said.

I believe that systemd won out because they chose to embrace some complexity to solve really hard problems. Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialization by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.

I made a point to clarify I do not think SysV init scripts are a good solution for most systems Starting the services in a correct maximally parallel order is a constraint satisfaction problem, and many modern alternative init systems understand that. My personal favorite, dinit, explicitly uses the systemd model to great success, being faster than runit or OpenRC with less LoC. If someone finds that too opaque, they are free to use a more imperative init system without any obstacles.

They chose to solve hard problems and people adopted it. It's not anything more sinister. It's definitely not an "un-auditable mess". It's written in well-formatted C with structure, good tooling, and an open community. You can disagree with the ideology but that's open source for you.

A piece of software being hard to understand doesn't imply it's because it's badly written. systemd is simply more complex as an "enterprise" piece of software. Think about it: RedHat's business is selling support contracts, so they won't risk losing a major contract by not implementing a feature their client needs, even if most won't use it. This both made it more robust and much wider in scope than other init systems, maintained mostly by hobbyist desktops.

For contrast, despite Canonical having killed Upstart in 2014, Google still feels confident enough in its security to deploy it across millions of ChromeOS devices, because it's a simple program that does one thing well, and thus no more risky than any other privileged binary.

systemd was chosen by distros and users across different communities because it solves hard problems better than the others. We can debate about why that is, but the maintainers of Systemd aren't running smear campaigns against other open source projects. Often systemd is the subject of such ire.

I'm not ascribing any intent to systemd maintainers. But it's undeniable there exists a connection between GNOME, Freedesktop, and systemd, namely that each receive support from RedHat and share the most active RedHat contributors. When systemd releases a new feature, GNOME very soon integrates it, which FreeDesktop then uses as a justification for their new specification, which other desktops soon follow. This often lead us to fast-tracking adoption of genuinely good standards, but there is the confounding factor of funding to their general merit.

tempfile• 1 year ago

You make it sound like systemd manufactured this monoculture somehow.

Where are you getting this from? I do not see it at all. The parent comment just says that it is an emergent compromise they don't think is a good one. That the code cannot be audited is also not necessarily a quality issue, either. It is just impossible to feasibly audit over 10 million lines of C. (this criticism applies equally to the kernel, although I doubt anyone would claim the kernel is less audited than systemd)

Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialisation by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.

Nobody is pretending this. the comment you are replying to literally says "I don't think it represents the current state of the community".

adrian_b5• 1 year ago

What you say would be more credible if you would provide a list of those "hard problems".

I have been using Linux on many desktops, laptops, servers, including on my primary workstations, for the last 30 years. I have also managed Linux on the computers of other people who have successfully used Linux for many years, despite the fact that they did not know what "Linux" is.

During all these years, both at home and at various companies, I have never encountered any of those problems for which systemd is supposedly required.

Using systemd appears to be a matter of preference, not of necessity. However I have never seen any Linux users who could explain their preference for systemd.

Systemd is ubiquitous now because it has been chosen by the maintainers of most major Linux distributions, not because it has been chosen by any end-users. Most maintainers also have not chosen it for any personal reasons, but because the maintenance of the distribution would have become a PITA without systemd, due to the dependencies introduced by a few important packages, like GNOME, which were thought to be indispensable in any distribution.

Perhaps systemd has some advantages that I am not aware of, but with certainty the proponents of systemd suck at selling it, because they have never been able to describe those advantages. Instead of trying to convince others that systemd is technically superior, the dependencies upon systemd have been imposed by force upon all Linux users by a relatively small number of developers.

By coincidence, just these days I have begun to study elogind, which is mentioned in TFA and which is a workaround for not having a complete systemd.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had succeeded to not use even elogind, but the last version of the Xorg server has acquired a hard dependency on systemd, so after upgrading it now I have to run this additional useless elogind daemon, to simulate the presence of systemd. I have begun to study elogind because launching it early during boot seems to have introduced some bugs in the behavior of the Linux virtual consoles. Even if I normally do not use those, I have been intrigued so I have started to investigate what elogind really does.

After these news about GNOME, I think that I will be forced to do a much more thorough study of elogind and systemd than I would have ever wanted to do, in order to write some replacements for satisfying any systemd dependencies in the applications that I am interested. I do not use GNOME, but there are useful applications that expect some GNOME services, and those may become now more dependent of systemd.

I hate that I will have to do a lot of work without any obvious useful purpose, just to keep running the same programs that previously worked fine without systemd.

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

The end of the article details the steps necessary for people who want to run Gnome without systemd. There is a monoculture of sorts, which is that bespoke init systems aren't tested or supported by Gnome itself, but like you already need to do to get Gnome working normally, you can still patch in support for whatever system you prefer. The article even provides a list of services and APIs that you will need to hook up to Gnome to make it work.

You don't need to reimplement logind or D-Bus, but you will need to patch your mechanisms of choice into Gnome itself. Gnome isn't planning on maintaining a second copy of common system services that exist on modern systems anymore (a copy that is based on a hack in the first place). The burden of maintenance now falls on whoever wants to provide their own alternative.

All the extra work you need to do to get alternative init systems working is work the Gnome team no longer needs to do.

cphuntington97• 1 year ago

"And some are just running a musl system that can't even use systemd."

no longer…

https://catfox.life/2024/09/05/porting-systemd-to-musl-libc-...

guilhas3• 1 year ago

I think this is a good announcement. Just making things clear

Because let's be frank GDM/Gnome has not been playing well with other software for a while

sunshine-o2• 1 year ago

Funny how it doesn't matter anymore.

Gnome has been quite good for more than 10 years but nobody really care because the web browser has become the Desktop Environment. I haven't notices any change in the last 10-15 years.

and power users will use i3, sway or hyprland anyway.

The Gnome people create drama about irrelevant things to get attention like "the danger in theming apps", some minor UI changes or the stronger dependency on systemd but few people care.

What I would worry more about in term of adoption across Unixes is Wayland, it seems the OpenBSD and FreeBSD people are not warm to it.

panick21_4• 1 year ago

Gnome without extensions is pretty terrible. Missing some just basic stuff that you really can't just not have. Most distros add that stuff back in.

But then the extensions aren't stable at all, its honestly a bit of a mess.

And in terms of performance its ok, but not exactly great.

I still use Gnome but mostly just because I'm used to it and hoping Cosmic will mature.

Gnome isn't bad, but they made a lot of dumb decisions that are just unnecessary. And they have been a disaster for Wayland development.

subjectsigma• 1 year ago

Gnome has been quite good for more than 10 years

I know there’s no accounting for taste, but GNOME Shell has to be the worst desktop environment I’ve ever used, and man I’ve used a lot of different ones

sunshine-o2• 1 year ago

Yeah let me put it in context.

I was exited and used Gnome 1.2 back in 2000 (?) It was fun but not serious compared to let's say the MS Windows 2000 desktop.

Progressing in the Gnome 2 serie it became a more serious project and something that could compete with the MS Windows desktop.

Both are full of annoyances...

nektro• 1 year ago

yay about time

surajrmal2• 1 year ago

What's interesting here isn't a strict dependency on systemd, but dependencies on some APIs it provides. Given the ability and existence of things which implement those APIs outside of systemd, it's worth considering that the APIs themselves should be the focus. Perhaps they should be spun out of systemd itself. It seems sensible to that gnome would want to move to a better API which is almost defacto a standard these days anyways. Versioning the API and allowing more folks outside of the systemd organization to participate in its continued evolution should be the focus imo.

adrian_b5• 1 year ago

The problem is that those APIs are not well documented, so reading the convolute source code may be the only documentation in some cases.

Perhaps there is some documentation, but it is well hidden.

Just these days, after being hit by the fact that the Xorg server has become dependent on systemd, I have begun to search for what elogind is really doing to simulate the login services of systemd. I have not found any easy way to discover that, except by reading the source code, which is not simple at all.

I would not care if GNOME or any other package would add systemd dependencies, but these were accompanied by a document describing precisely the protocols or APIs they use for accessing systemd services, so that it would be easy to write alternative implementations.

The reality is that no such documentation is provided, so the only way to avoid systemd is to become an expert in its internals. This is why I hate when such new dependencies are added.

blucaz2• 1 year ago

The reality is that no such documentation is provided, so the only way to avoid systemd is to become an expert in its internals.

The blog post subject of the thread literally links to the documentation. If you can't even be bothered clicking on the provided links, what are you even doing commenting on such a thread. But by all means, don't let facts get in the way of a good baseless rant.

accelbred• 1 year ago

This seems like it might impact systemd musl systems too, due to the NSS and getpwent requirement, right?

peregrinus_13• 1 year ago

I wonder if the changes to GDM will mean that other DE's like Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Deepen (XFCE?) won't be able to start anymore via GDM?

Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd

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