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.
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I read as “Arch Linux drops support for GNOME” and my heart fluttered
I did the same but was skeptical since Arch is an only systemd system so there’s no point it would affect Arch anyways
I did the same even though I had seen this headline before
I dug up this link from June, which tells us why they made such a design choice of strong depressing on systemd.
https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
Funny thing is every open source developer strives to support as many systems and platforms as possible, by following best practices and open standards, GNOME goes backwards.
Sounds like those people who like GNOME but dislike systemd have a choice to make. Most GNOME end users, like me, have no idea what the function of systemd actually is or why we should be concerned, and I’ve been using GNU-Linux for over 20 years. I’m glad there are people much more computer literate than me viewing it as a problem and searching for solutions.
They’re all searching for “solutions” but nobody is creating them. Funny how most of the people complaining about systemd aren’t actually system devs themselves and thus have no clue what they’re talking about.
Nobody (not even GNOME) is actively wanting to force systemd and keep out alternatives, there just aren’t any proper alternatives offering the same kind of functionality and quality.
seems like a skill issue to me since the Guix people just added integration for their init system without a problem
