A line in the sand

Posted Jul 4, 2025 10:52 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: A line in the sand by zahlman
Parent article: GNOME deepens systemd dependencies

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.