Gnome is definitely not heading in a good direction, but I don't think them going to systemd is really a problem for Slackware, or anyone else. Let them fade into obscurity, there is no shortage of better DEs that are improving over time, rather than degrading.

I don't think moving DEs to be systemd dependent would be a good idea and I don't expect it to catch on among software that wants to be portable to anything other than linux distros. As an optional dependency I can see it being fine, but for a DE like KDE which is used pretty heavily by the BSDs then moving to systemd just cuts off a not-insignificant portion of their userbase, since, at least from what I understand, systemd depends on the linux kernel and can't easily be ported to another system. Even if it's not linux dependent, I highly doubt the BSDs will be adopting it anyway.

I am a lot more worried about systemd maybe requiring gnome in order to run *shudders*

I haven't seen any of the flavors of Linux I use actually use Gnome 3. I know the BSDs and other UNICES out there still use Gnome 2, but I've hardly seen Gnome 3 at all.

Most I see is KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Trinity, and the Flux/Black Box, and the various other classic minimalist desktops. Xfce, and LDXE are becoming the favored desktops from what I've been noticing around the UNIX, BSD, and even Linux world.

And the CDE comment... CDE actually lives and in two forms. CDE itself from the OpenMotif Toolkit, and actually Xfce which was designed off the CDE concept.

Gnome 3.6 runs fine on OpenBSD 5.3 and Gnome 3.8 is in snapshots. A lot of work has been spent porting it over and it seems to work well, although I don't use it on my OpenBSD systems.

Yes, but currently Gnome 3.6.x and 3.8.x don't use systemd. I had thought originally they snubbed their nose at systemd, but I guess they are going to add it maybe for 3.10 or 4.x, or whatever version is after 3.8.x.

GNOME can still use consolekit as the session manager.

As far as I know, there is no plan to make systemd a hard dependency of GNOME.

The plan for GNOME OS is to provide a way to test GNOME and integrate it better in other distros.
That's it.

It still worries the sh.. out of me that they are both RH-driven - easy to sneak in a dependency there ... and I did see somewhere (though now I cant for the life of me remember where - or even when) that that was part of some 'grandios' plan

gnome has currently systemd only as option for gnome 3.8 and the soon 3.10 release.
According to what I have been reading it will stay an option for quite some time, due to stability of systemd.
so dont expect a hard dependency of systemd in gnome 3.x for the next 3 releases atleast.

Does anybody know if ChromeOS uses systemd? I am too lazy to ask on their mailing list. Or maybe somebody with a Chromebook can check.

I started using Linux in 2001. If I started now I'd think Linux is crap.

ChromeOS uses Upstart:

http://upstart.ubuntu.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart

Slackware 8.0 was nice. Slackware 14.0 is still nice. ;)

KDE has (optional) logind[0] support (without the need for CK) as well.
Supporting GNOME-only would be counterproductive for any "evil world domination" plan ;-)

[0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind

Coming to the conversation a bit late..

Regarding cgroups being "unusable" without systemd: LXC is based on cgroups, and LXC is a real-life solution for lightweight virtualization, and does not depend on systemd. Reading through that whole "using cgroups requires systemd" subthread was rather bizarre.

Regarding the opacity of systemd: I can think of several occasions where some quirk of my employer's datacenter environment required modification of rc scripts to make things work right (like, acquiring a lease on two DHCP servers instead of one, pinging a server to make sure it's up before bringing up httpd locally, or just adjusting the timeout parameter for dhcpcd). Systemd seems to assume that its way to do things will always be the right way. Please correct me if I am wrong about this. Adjusting it when it's not doing the right thing will be beyond the capabilities of the average /bin/sh-coding sysadmin.

That would be bad for a lot of /bin/sh-capable sysadmins, who would suddenly be unable to do their jobs.

Mainly because containers have absolutely nothing to do with with your initial real-hardware boot init.

I really like LXC though.

Yeah, it was proposed some time ago on their mailing list to make it a hard dependency, but it was refused.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desk.../msg00043.html

Seriously, there is no grandios plan here. They just want make a more "coherent" and tightly-integrated OS.

Let's say that it is an evil plan to conquer the world.

Well, Arch Linux, Mandriva, Mageia, openSUSE, Gentoo, Debian, Frugalware, Fedora(obvious), are all proposing systemd by default or it is packaged and you have the choice to use it or not.

A lot of individuals seems to have interest in systemd and these people are coming from different distros.

I would be very surprised if systemd would die when it has so many contributors from so much different background.

But you know, maybe i'm mistaken.