Comment Still choice (Score 1) 993
but that GNOME is sufficiently important to drive systemd uptake
You still get the choice between:
- keeping GNOME and SystemD.
- throwing away GNOME + SystemD, and switching to KDE, or LXDE, or XFCE, or Unity, or Enlightment, or MATE (or even a mix of Cinamon that relies on gnomelibs that are systemd-free).
(Though probably given that - no matter how much you refuse to believe - systemd *IS* actually useful and *DOES* help solving real-world needs, probably KDE is going to start using it some time in the future, too.
On the other hand, KDE being KDE and being much about choice, KDE will probably go the "phonon" route: they'll probably make a new module in kdelibs called "libkde-systemk" which is a very simple API and high level abstraction of the few features they need, and which can use systemd as a back-end, but could also use systembsd, other backend or even whatever could produce the same functionality under Mac OS X [Launchd] and Windows [huh...?] )
GNOME is *NOT* a absolute requirement for Linux.
And several distros *DID* switch away from it (but not on the grounds of systemd. Mostly because they didn't like the direction Gnome 3 was heading):
- Gnome2 got forked into MATE and had quite some success.
- Ubuntu created their own Unity.
- Mint started their Cinnamon fork of Gnom3
- Some distro switched to XFCE to have a "Gnomish look" but less resource requirement than Gnome 2/3
etc.
Now in fact if you look at it closely:
- Yes, Fedora *IS* a GNOME-based distribution, and they also use SystemD, but...
- openSUSE has been systemd-powered for the past 4 releases (~3 years ago, ~1.5 year after the systemd launch) . Yet, opensuse *IS NOT* a GNOME-based distro. KDE has always been the default, although suse has always made the effort to support both KDE and Gnome as first-class DE making effort to customise and integrate them both.
- ubuntu did switch from Gnome to Unity... but they are switching from Upstart to systemd.
Apparently, systemd might be useful enough that even distros that DO NOT depend on Gnome3, STILL decide to pick it up.
The only remaining practical questions are:
- how much until it becomes stable and mature enough (opensuse is showing signs that this is soon)
- how long will it stay before "let's change everything" madness strikes again.