A line in the sand [LWN.net]

A line in the sand

Posted Jul 4, 2025 3:25 UTC (Fri) by zahlman (guest, #175387)
Parent article: GNOME deepens systemd dependencies

> GNOME contributor Emmanuele Bassi said that he didn't think that a huge part of GNOME's user base was running a non-systemd-based distribution in 2025.

It's hard for me to imagine that a huge part of the user base of non-systemd-based distributions are running GNOME, similarly. In particular, it looks like a real pain to deal with on Artix already, while Xfce appears to be default on Devuan and Gentoo — with the latter trying pretty hard to support users who want it since it became technically feasible, but it hardly seems essential.

In the last few months — especially with the Xlibre drama playing out — I've been noticing a pretty clear conflict in the overall world of Linux, with RedHat and the GNOME Foundation on one side, and everyone else (even other systemd embracers) on the other side. Of course GNOME would like to move towards a systemd-only world; systemd comes from RedHat, which is the largest corporate contributor to the GNOME Project. It's exactly as unsurprising as the plan to focus on Wayland, which is also RedHat's preference (from what I can tell, Xorg is already gone in the newly released RHEL 10, with XWayland serving as a stop-gap, and that was already planned almost two years ago). And of course (this does get a little more conspiratorial) the GNOME Foundation is happy to do what RedHat wants, because they dropped ties with GNU in 2021 (and were trying since 2019 if you believe Neil McGovern) and corporate sponsorship represents money that most FOSS projects simply cannot access.

In short, I fully expect that other non-systemd distros will simply drop support for GNOME Desktop rather than trying to apply their own hacks. At best they might maintain an EOL version for a while. The way I see it, there's simply no love lost between them; multiple aspects of the GNOME philosophy run counter to what users are looking for when they choose such a distro. From that perspective — the one driven by user freedom and a preference for modularity — GNOME have quite literally forgotten what they stand for.

(I say this not as an advocate — I don't particularly care myself — but as someone who has listened to them.)

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A line in the sand

Posted Jul 4, 2025 10:52 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

In the end it probably comes down to whether there are people who feel strongly enough about the non-systemd case to actually shoulder the support burden of keeping it going. Hand-wringing by people who don't agree with what the GNOME project is planning to do but aren't prepared to get their own hands dirty doesn't really count.

I don't even think Red Hat has a lot to do with it. Systemd has been around for quite some time now and there is a very widespread consensus – certainly among most distribution providers including but not limited to Red Hat – that it is the way to go¹. So even if we leave Red Hat out of the picture entirely, it makes reasonable sense for the GNOME project to avail itself officially of systemd services that are widely available, instead of expending effort to keep supporting a technology stack which has, de facto, been supplanted in most of the important Linux distributions for more than a decade.

The situation with Wayland is basically similar; virtually all the people who used to work on Xorg are now working on Wayland instead, so we don't need to come up with a conspiracy narrative that this is all because of Red Hat – the problems of X11 are well-known, and if you're into display servers, it does make sense to work on something new and exciting instead of applying more band aids and baling wire to something that has been around since the 1980s. X11 did have a good run in its time but nobody should be faulted for focusing on a new approach that actually suits modern hardware. (Especially since you still get to run X11 applications in a Wayland environment.)

1. Here, too, hand-wringing by systemd detractors has not led to a viable systemd alternative; outfits like Devuan have generally continued with the ancient pre-systemd tooling (and all its shortcomings, warts, and inconsistencies) instead.