Some of you have probably seen the blog post a few months ago about how GNOME is more strongly depending on systemd. The changes mentioned there have landed into the latest stable versions of the mentioned software (GNOME 49) and do affect us. In particular, the main culprit is the removal of the non-systemd fallback code in gnome-session. This makes it currently impossible to launch gnome-shell/mutter on a non-systemd system. A fairly straightforward patch of using elogind, like what was previously done, no longer works either.
Since we don’t have the time or interest to write a new non-systemd codepath for gnome-session, this means that all support for gnome-based desktops has to be dropped. In particular, the affected packages would be gnome-session, gnome-shell, mutter, and gnome-settings-daemon. For now, the old versions are still in the repos but because there is so much intertwining between other gtk/gnome packages, there is no guarantee they actually work and will later be removed from our repos.
Standalone gnome applications will still continue to be packaged, but it is simply not feasible anymore to support gnome desktops without systemd.
Slightly off on that, SystemD does too many things as PID1, and there are a lot of attack vectors that come with that. It doesn’t follow the Free Software of ethos of “do one thing, and one thing well”.
it’s quite modular. I would argue that each individual component does follow that ethos
It is lots of modules but not really that modular. There is little concern about working with anything else.
If it were properly modular, systemd would be built from universal components, which could be used by other init systems. But it’s the other way around. Meaning the universal components are created by taking them out of systemd. For example elogind is “extracted” from systemd to be a standalone daemon.
systemd isn’t a pid1; systemd-init is
Compared to what? Most services do not run PID1
It’s not called systemD. It’s just systemd.
systemdeez nuts