Here’s something that’s both surprising and, in a way, not surprising at all, especially after yesterday’s announcement from KaOS, a distribution long known for its deep commitment to the KDE Plasma desktop, that it plans to move away from it. The main reason cited was KDE’s reliance on systemd in a specific component.
As expected, the news quickly gained traction, prompting KDE to clarify its dependence on systemd and which parts of the desktop environment rely on it. In a post on KDE’s Reddit community titled “A quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk ‘the KDE is forcing systemd!’ hoax“, the contributor described the claims as misinformation and provided a short FAQ clarifying the project’s position.
As someone who relies on systemd, but wants to have alternatives:
While it is good that other login managers will still be able to start Plasma, making the default new login manager reliant on systemd is bad. It means that non-standard installations of KDE will now require more manual labor to make it work right. And while installing sddm is not big of a hassle, this sets a precedent that can later be expanded, making it a death by a thousand cuts for everything that dares not use systemd in its operation.
I still wonder if the systemd imposition on the new login manager is absolute and can’t be circumvented in any way, i.e. GNOME is allegedly dependent on systemd but you can circumvent it by using logind instead of the full systemd install
That’s because someone took the time to pull out the minimum required interface code from systemd to make elogind after gnome made such a mess of things. It’s a band-aid. More band-aids will no doubt be created to deal with this. It’s just that the necessity is annoying.
Why bother? It’s not like there’s a shortage of login managers out there.
I just don’t like ssdm or logind non-integration with kde.
Systemd ist great and people who hate it, are also likely the same ones running openbox or a similar ancient window manager.
KDE should do what enables best user experience, not bend over for radicals stuck in the past.
I think KDE should force systemd.
“Systemd is great”, then systemdeeznuts and go use it. Don’t make it a huge piece of shit half-imitation of svchost.exe that forces incompatibilities, so we can fuck off and use our own shit if we want to.
That was always allowed.
They should run tvwm. It’s a great window manager, I ran it for years, in the 90s.
I like how the “FAQ” answers questions nobody was asking and accuses opponents of truth, freedom, and systemd of “decontextualising comments on merge requests” without mentioning what was actually said by whom in those merge requests so we could judge for ourselves. As a PR move to put out the flame war (which itself does seem really pointless) it seems counterproductive. But it looks like it’s just another reddit post, not an official KDE policy statement or anything.
opponents of truth, freedom, and systemd
Do you get paid by the Systemd Hate Club™ for your efforts? Are you full-time, or just a freelance clown?
