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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @09:16PM
I don't know what to think of that video... However, Devuan is a knee-jerk reaction that likely won't succeed. Systemd represents death (or in this case, change) by a thousand paper-cuts (dependencies). As projects like KDE adopt systemd, they also abandon or remove legacy code supporting alternatives. As more projects follow, Devuan will find itself overcome with patching them all to work without systemd - or they'll be forced to continuously update shims to maintain the systemd-like bits that allow dependent apps to function. As complexity continues to increase, the shims will begin to look more like full replacements for systemd until there are a bunch of clones floating about; none of them being a perfect solution. Eventually people will say 'fuck it' and just adopt the real thing.
You don't stop systemd by forking distros because that just weakens one project while also creating an understaffed new project. In fact, the time to stop it has already passed... If you disagree with systemd and are in a position to make decisions then take the plunge and choose BSD. Most customers won't notice or care and you may actually enjoy working with a different, yet oddly familiar, operating system.
Linux was once appealing because it was developed by 'the people' rather than the corporations. Sadly, that romantic ideal hasn't been true for a very long time. Aside from smaller projects, Linux development is very much driven by corporate interests today. As others have mentioned, systemd is another step in the 'Windows-fication' of Linux (think svchost) which actually makes some sense if the roadmap is influenced by companies. Systemd hits a lot of birds with a single stone: consolidation of power, unification of services, a single standard to support, competitive advantage (RH has access to undocumented features and can easily add whatever they want; others must wade through hoops and red tape), and it also disrupts the other distros; allowing RH an opportunity to surge ahead while the rest scramble to adopt without losing users. A Debian install offered no direct benefit to Red Hat. A Centos install was less-bad because it closely tracked RHEL and providers an easier transition path to RHEL than other distros. In this regard, all systemd distros will soon be more like Centos (easier to support, quicker path to RHEL for up-sells)...
Init worked fine before so that's not the real reason for systemd. Many addon cards for servers have their own BIOS that often delay system boot by up to several minutes (such as RAID cards) so faster boots also are not the real reason either. Swapping out the core guts of every major distro with bits developed by Red Hat (and securing that position with weak dependencies), well... that's a really good reason for systemd to exist. It almost borders on embrace, extend, extinguish; only this time it's Red Hat instead of Microsoft...