Gnome doesn't have a hard dependency on systemd. The systemd team was pushing for that, but the Gnome team made it an optional dependency.

Did he add that code to Gnome?

Good thing there is no != assignment operator.......

Gimp doesn't seem to depend on systemd (here is a brief discussion on the topic). It seems to be a rumor, but I don't know where it started.

Systemd is not a hard dependency of Gnome, and probably never will be. I'm not sure why people think that.

Sweet thanks!

The main thing I think you're missing is that systemd makes some people happy and some people sad. And the set of people it has to make happy is very small (as to the set of people who it actually makes happy and the set of people it actually makes sad: I have no idea how large those sets are, and probably no one else does either).

The carrot is making things as easy as possible for the people who write init scripts in distros (since they are the ones who are responsible for deciding whether systemd is adopted or not). That is discussed here and here. The stick are the emotional posts that the author spreads throughout the internet (threatening distro irrelevance, etc).

Here's a link I have handy to where he was pushing it for Gnome.

You can add that it makes init scripts a lot easier to write.

Serious question: how do you deal with updating your system? With no 'apt-get update' what do you do? Most importantly, how do you make sure to get the latest security updates?

Systemd has laudable goals and people do want it. That's why it's been adopted, because some people want what it does. "It fills a use case people have" is what Linus says. And that use case happens to be the one that desired by the people responsible for building distros.

I don't think it's that bad, they don't have to convince the entire 'tech-savvy community,' they only need to convince a very small subset of that community, the people who are writing init scripts for distros. And that subset is very small.

Systemd knows that very well. They've worked very hard to make init-script writers happy, and have been very responsive in making changes. If you look through the Debian mailing lists, you can see this......there's no need to blame the NSA or others. They're just following a useful principle: find the ones who have power to do what you want, then make them as happy as possible. The systemd people have done that.

Cool thing, even in the beginning Unix had man pages. You can check them out.

Well, it does, but it's a soft dependency (can be replaced by other things). So whatever word you want to use for that is fine.

I don't know if 'raison d'etre' is the right word here, since there are many potential reasons it could exist......but the reason it's been adopted is primarily because it makes it easier to write init scripts. That's really all people really seem to want (there are some other interesting ideas in systemd, like a unified API for accessing USB but IMO that is utterly useless without cross-platform compatibility).

Thank you, sir.

btw I've seen the above porting strategy used many times, even in some bizarrely different platforms, so I feel confident it could work in this case.