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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @09:28PM
No one was forcing anyone to adapt systemd, let alone adapt it so soon.
That's like saying "I'm not forcing you to stop driving a car, I'm just removing all gas stations in a 100 km radius around where you live. You can still drive if you want to. You can even get gas and refill your car to keep driving. It's your choice." True each application can choose to adopt or not adopt to it, but given how tightly integrated it is with certain applications if you have any dependency on one of those applications you are stuck with the "choice" of either not adopting it and manually working around it (driving 100km each time you want to get a patch), or adopting it (stop driving your car). Nominally you have a choice, but only in a superficial sense.
From the technical standpoint, there is nothing seriously wrong with systemd, meaning that whatever faults it has today can be fixed tomorrow. (For example, binary logs are stupid, but there is nothing preventing admins from keeping text logs as well.)
Unless you happen to disagree with the design philosophy of system (i.e. "having it do everything" with the commensurate loss of control and increased system fragility). That can't be "fixed" as such. And in the meantime, you are still using unproven software which may have security holes, stability issues, maintenance issues, or whatever else.
It's not an "infection", it's just one of the half-a-dozen DEs going non-portable.
Calling KDE "just one of the half-a-dozen DEs" grossly under-represents how big and important it is. And the word "infection" is a perfect term given the network effects of dependencies across software packages.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by melikamp on Friday February 20 2015, @09:43PM
The parent post is a perfect example of the unadulterated value-laden cow dung I was talking about, complete with "design philosophy" nonsense. It fails to address the single point I was stressing: distributions independent of Red Hat are adopting systemd by choice, and userland applications create hard dependencies on systemd not only by choice, but also because they, apparently, intend to be unportable just for lulz. Good riddance. There is no doom coming, systemd is just another init, and not the worst one, and while some upheaval will force some users to seek new pastures, what we observe is business as usual.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Friday February 20 2015, @10:24PM
And I think YOU sir have missed the point of many here, which is that the users have said by a pretty damned large margin "We do NOT want this" and the devs have turned top their own users and said "Fuck you, we do not care what you want"...yes this attitude is very disturbing, and when you see distros that are supposedly "stability over all" like Debian jump on the bandwagon and start throwing up appeals to emotion instead of technical arguments?
Well as I have said in other posts everybody can call me a tinfoil hatter (just as they did everybody who said our calls were monitored before Manning) but the combination of timing, coming so soon after Snowden let loose the TLAs best tricks and many are pushing Linux as a platform for secure communication, mixed with the frankly bizarre posting made by devs defending Poettering....I mean for fucks sake LP in one of his own posts said along the lines of "Can't get systemd working on ARM, fuck it shipping anyway" and devs not only didn't condemn him for treating a critical subsystem like systemd like its a fricking videogame patch and busted his ass for sending it out broken but they rushed to DEFEND such Mickey Mouse behavior? I'm sorry but the top tier Linux guys have NEVER been tolerant of the "fuck it, ship it and we'll patych later" kind of cowboy bullshit, they condemn that kind of shit on the Windows side all the time!
I'm sorry but something is rotten in Denmark, the entire dev community is just too quick and too easy and too busy acting like every day is opposite day for me to believe this is a natural or organic change in the landscape. Whether this is the TLAs that pretty much own Red Hat making sure there is a nice easily exploitable back door so that all these "secure communication distros" are just so much warm fuzzy BS, or Red Hat trying to become the big boss? I have no idea. All I do know is I have been keeping an eye on Linux since around 2003 and I can honestly say I have NEVER seen Linux distro devs behave in such a strange and anti-user fashion before, never.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1, Troll) by melikamp on Friday February 20 2015, @10:41PM
This has absolutely nothing to do with either systemd or the "cabal" or anything at all in the sense that it's a completely generic problem, and can only be described as "business as usual". This is exactly how developers relate to users during a software development cycle; this is true for the free software, and 3 times as true for the proprietary spyware. Exceptions are rare and precious. And if you or any of the systemd doomsayers were actually interested in solving THIS problem, you wouldn't make it about your personal hatred of the "cabal" and everything they stand for, would you? You would talk about the community culture at large, problems in communication, structural inefficiencies, etc.
Both GNU and Linux are maturing and growing, and it makes sense that each new change in the ecosystem brings a bigger upheaval, that's all. We transitioned from an ecosystem where many users were also contributors to the one where almost all users are pure users. And pure users are NEVER happy with change, and when there are 100 times more of them, they are 100 times more vocal about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:48AM
Not sure how many are adopting them by choice, or by seeing the 800 pound gorilla throwing its weight around and not wanting to be in the way. Systemd is adopting more and more "container" functionality. CoreOS recently used this to launch a rival to Docker, and recent Systemd releases has gained the ability to import Docker containers. RH event stated that the cloud would be a big focus of theirs moving forward. In essence, if you want to be in the server game going forward you better follow RH's lead.