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Earlier this week, KDE developer David Edmundson described in his blog how KDE would be tied to logind and timedated but not systemd itself, at least according to his claim that "The init system is one part of systemd that doesn't affect us at all, and any other could be used.".
Later, in the blog comments, he clarifies that starting with plasma 5.5, in 6 months, they'll drop "legacy" support, according to a decision taken in the plasma sprint.
Even if one can only guess why there is no formal announcement, it seems clear - unless somehow there is a shim or emulator, not only for logind but also for timedated, in 6 months KDE will be unusable unless you are running systemd. And the blog entry makes it clear that the plan is to remove more and more functionality from KDE and use systemd instead.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @07:00PM
It's already over, systemd won a long time ago. It won because most people are willing to complain but only a very small percentage are willing to take action (like ditch Linux for BSD). Hell, even if the whole developer base jumped ship, systemd would still continue on because you're not the customer! Governments and businesses are the customer and Red Hat only listens to those who pay. At this point, meaningful change can only come from system admins educating their clients (businesses and governments) on why avoiding systemd is a good idea. System admins are in the best position to affect change...
I recently rolled out several new BSD systems for one of my clients. I didn't ask them which OS I should pick because they couldn't care less about it. I chose FreeBSD because, well, fuck systemd. It took longer because I'm inexperienced with BSD and had to read up and work around some compatibility issues. Now my client has their new systems and they are happy. I avoided systemd and got paid so I'm happy. If enough IT folks begin silently migrating to BSD when convenient (i.e. replacing aging systems or adding new systems), eventually Red Hat could be forced to care about it (or at least acknowledge it).
Sometimes removing the turd from the punch bowl isn't enough to save the punch. In this case, Linux is the refreshing punch that we all wanted and Red Hat are the drunken ass who just shat in it. Real funny RH... Now please go sleep it off and, oh yeah, you're not invited to the next party...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @10:50PM
Actually, it is BSD that has already one. BSD gained many former Linux users who cares about init system flexibility, the bazaar model, and avoiding dependency hell. These are people who are more likely to contribute back to the distribution and upstream projects, unlike many of the people who stayed with systemd distributions. With BSD's recent gain in users with software development talent, they have more capability than ever to run KDE there, a KDE like desktop environment, Lumina, or the Trinity Desktop Environment. systemd has not won anything of value. systemd has actually lost something of value: They have chased off development talent to other software distributions and sysytemd is building a monstrosity that will be difficult for future development talent to maintain. This will not be realized now, but years from now, it will become more evident.
As this is a win for BSD, this is also a win for permissive free software as opposed to copyleft software. Copyleft is better at protecting the freedom of the user, as opposed to the software publisher.
If you want to stick with Linux and KDE, I suggest Devuan and the Trinity Desktop Environment.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 21 2015, @10:27AM
I am an *nix administrator for a federal agency (and have worked for state and large corporations) and I can tell you that you are 100% wrong. The customers don't know or care about systemd. They aren't clamoring for it. They just want reliable secure machines, RedHat is pushing this all on their own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @10:00AM
"Secure" seems to be the operating word here.
Supposedly one reason for Poettering to start on systemd was his growing interest in daemon and network security after developing pulseaudio (it can route sound over the network) and avahi (yep, thats his).
He was also involved with consolekit for a while, and pretty much the person that declared it dead in favor of logind. This because of some apparent corner cases with the consolekit seat tracking.
"Security" seems to also be what is pushing the development of containerization in Gnome (depending heavily on systemd for handling the nitty gritty stuff) and in part Wayland.
And all of that seems to be germinating in Fedora, that happens to be what RH is skimming ever so often to spin a new RHEL.
Frankly all this brings to mind the old computer security joke about the secure computer being one encased in concrete at the bottom of the ocean. And likely the netsecs driving these changes don't get the joke...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @07:14PM
Red Hat develops new tech based on their own experience working with clients. It is very likely that they see an opportunity for systemd to solve some real issues AND as a way to disrupt (or exert some control) over a wider selection of distros. To me, systemd makes a typical distro more Centos-like; which is good if you're Red Hat. It also slowly locks software to systemd/Linux as dependencies grow stronger. Remember, the community was chastised when it first speculated that unnecessary dependencies would be introduced to further adoption. Then Gnome, Gimp, and now KDE (among others) have all announced dependencies of some kind. More will follow...