Re: Bits from the DPL (August 2019)
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
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