Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd

But then the extensions aren't stable at all, its honestly a bit of a mess.

And in terms of performance its ok, but not exactly great.

I still use Gnome but mostly just because I'm used to it and hoping Cosmic will mature.

Gnome isn't bad, but they made a lot of dumb decisions that are just unnecessary. And they have been a disaster for Wayland development.

> In the past, I have been telling anyone who wanted to listen that if all you want is sd_notify() then don't bother linking to libsystemd, since the protocol is stable and should be considered the API, not our C wrapper around it. After all, the protocol is so trivial

I'm actually surprised that they added the note about code duplication after adding the standalone implementation specifically so people won't do that.

I have been using Linux on many desktops, laptops, servers, including on my primary workstations, for the last 30 years. I have also managed Linux on the computers of other people who have successfully used Linux for many years, despite the fact that they did not know what "Linux" is.

During all these years, both at home and at various companies, I have never encountered any of those problems for which systemd is supposedly required.

Using systemd appears to be a matter of preference, not of necessity. However I have never seen any Linux users who could explain their preference for systemd.

Systemd is ubiquitous now because it has been chosen by the maintainers of most major Linux distributions, not because it has been chosen by any end-users. Most maintainers also have not chosen it for any personal reasons, but because the maintenance of the distribution would have become a PITA without systemd, due to the dependencies introduced by a few important packages, like GNOME, which were thought to be indispensable in any distribution.

Perhaps systemd has some advantages that I am not aware of, but with certainty the proponents of systemd suck at selling it, because they have never been able to describe those advantages. Instead of trying to convince others that systemd is technically superior, the dependencies upon systemd have been imposed by force upon all Linux users by a relatively small number of developers.

By coincidence, just these days I have begun to study elogind, which is mentioned in TFA and which is a workaround for not having a complete systemd.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had succeeded to not use even elogind, but the last version of the Xorg server has acquired a hard dependency on systemd, so after upgrading it now I have to run this additional useless elogind daemon, to simulate the presence of systemd. I have begun to study elogind because launching it early during boot seems to have introduced some bugs in the behavior of the Linux virtual consoles. Even if I normally do not use those, I have been intrigued so I have started to investigate what elogind really does.

After these news about GNOME, I think that I will be forced to do a much more thorough study of elogind and systemd than I would have ever wanted to do, in order to write some replacements for satisfying any systemd dependencies in the applications that I am interested. I do not use GNOME, but there are useful applications that expect some GNOME services, and those may become now more dependent of systemd.

I hate that I will have to do a lot of work without any obvious useful purpose, just to keep running the same programs that previously worked fine without systemd.

I have yet to hear any argument pro systemd that is valid.

As long as the systemd supporters cannot explain its advantages, there is no reason for anybody else to replace their good systems that work fine without systemd, with systems using systemd.

In practice, systemd has been imposed by force. The developers of a few packages, like GNOME, have introduced dependencies upon systemd. Then the maintainers of the major Linux distributions have considered that such packages cannot be removed from their distribution, therefore they must base it on systemd.

Then the users have discovered when upgrading their computers that they must either migrate to systemd or stay with their ancient program versions.

This is how systemd has propagated. In no place there was any analysis about technical advantages and any attempt to find an optimal solution by consensus.

Perhaps there is some documentation, but it is well hidden.

Just these days, after being hit by the fact that the Xorg server has become dependent on systemd, I have begun to search for what elogind is really doing to simulate the login services of systemd. I have not found any easy way to discover that, except by reading the source code, which is not simple at all.

I would not care if GNOME or any other package would add systemd dependencies, but these were accompanied by a document describing precisely the protocols or APIs they use for accessing systemd services, so that it would be easy to write alternative implementations.

The reality is that no such documentation is provided, so the only way to avoid systemd is to become an expert in its internals. This is why I hate when such new dependencies are added.