alt Hacker NewsWhile I think systemd is a great init system (as well as some other components under the systemd umbrella), I really dislike when components up in the stack hard-depend on it. We can't use GNOME, plasma-login-manager, and soon Flatpak without systemd.
Maybe systemd should have been an API + a spec instead of an unportable implementation.
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> Maybe systemd should have been an API + a spec instead of an unportable implementation.
There's nothing really stopping other init systems from implementing it's unit spec, some hobby ones have done so.
In the case of GNOME, KDE etc depending on it, the reason mainly boils down to "we could implement our own manager for handling desktop daemons etc or just get systemd to do it for us"
Like wayland?
Where none of the desktop environments offer the same feature set. And the more compositors there are the harder it is for apps to use those new protocols, and guaranteeing a ton of bug reports from users using an unsupported compositor. That just hinders Linux desktop app development.
A gentoo dev actually showed that GNOME can work without systemd. The gentoo wiki explained it.
I never tested this myself, as I also dislike GNOME3 from a UI view (I am fine with mate-desktop though), but I found this to be epic from the Gentoo folks - a single man flipping a finger to the systemd devs. The underdog winning the fight.
A shame gentoo kind of went into its own hole for years ...
FWIW GNOME can be used without systemd, and this is how Guix System does it. I think over time more and more components are depending on systemd, but at the current moment it is still feasible to swap them out for replacements that don't.
Maybe this statement actually holds in reverse?
Quoting vbernat's comment on Lobsters:
systemd was a "gift" for people running alternative desktop systems. Previously, many services were bundled with GNOME and you had to go through many hops to use them on a non-GNOME desktop (for example, GNOME Power Manager). systemd replaced many of these GNOME-only piece of software that were constantly breaking when you tried to use them outside of GNOME. Alternative desktop environments didn't need to write their own version of system-related tools.
So, while this may be seen as centralization, I don't think we would have seen so many desktop environments without systemd. In the past (15+ years), systems were simpler and there was not many things to abstract.
I'm all for integration of system services if it helps bring a more cohesive OS. Interchangeability is a nice thing when building a system but I don't need it as a user.