Dear Mo. Mo Zhou - 24.09.19, 04:58:06 CEST: > For desktop users, non-systemd init plus a mordern desktop environment > such as Plasma or Gnome would be impossible on Debian, as they depend > on systemd. Some other distro such as Gentoo and FreeBSD have somehow > removed the systemd dependency for Gnome but I'm sure how much amount > of patchwork is required.
This is clearly not true with current Debian Sid (and a little glue package from experimental at the moment). This laptop is testimony to that. I am writing this with KMail on a KDE Plasma desktop and no systemd / libsystemd packages installed, using sysvinit instead. It is running like this for *months* already. They depend on systemd-logind which can be replaced by elogind – actually that is a huge part of the discussion in this thread, did you actually *read* it? elogind as I remember is coming from Gentoo / BSD efforts. And I am not sure whether KDE Plasma really depends on it or whether it could still be used with ConsoleKit 2, which may not really be maintained anymore I read somewhere. However I did not test GNOME myself, but saw reports of Devuan users that it works. And if it works in Devuan it likely would work with Debian as well, as Devuan developers work on the necessary packages within Debian in the debian-init-diversity initiative. Please do not spread rumors on the state of what is possible in Debian if you did not test for yourself. Thank you. Of course another question would be whether such a setup would be supported by upstream developers or by package maintainers. For KDE upstream developers I am pretty confident that they would accept bug reports from users of such setups. They are at least semi-officially supporting FreeBSD. For many bug reports it would not even matter what is running as PID 1. Similar goes with Debian/Kubuntu Qt/KDE team, I believe they would at least look at bug reports from users with of a different PID 1 than systemd. I did not ask them yet, so, of course this is only my own guessing for now. Of course there is an increased risk that with an alternative init system you are a more likely being asked to keep the pieces in case something breaks. But I am prepared for that. I know my way with Linux enough in order to deal with such situations. Best, -- Martin
