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: 2) by Magic Oddball on Saturday February 21 2015, @06:02AM
PCLinuxOS [pclinuxos.com] is a good drop-in replacement for regular users (I ditched 'buntu 5 years ago during the "we want window buttons on the left and we don't care what users want/need so STFU" debacle), as I thankfully learned in December. It was a huge relief to be able to trust my computer to stay up & fully-functional for more than a day or two at a time, which was the best I could manage under any of the systemd distros (including before I realized the newly-installed systemd was the reason my laptop had turned so unstable).
I looked into Slackware, but like Gentoo, it's a distro for people that want to spend their time delving into the nitty-gritty levels of Linux, not for those of us that think Linux makes a wonderfully flexible, fast, user-controllable OS that we can use while focusing on entirely unrelated tasks. :-)