The article states that various things in Gnome 49 will be more reliant on systemd. Since void doesn’t have systemd, what does this mean for Gnome 49 on void?
I have found the source. PSA: Stay away from these third-party news sites.
https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
The first paragraph says:
Doesn’t GNOME already depend on systemd?
Kinda… GNOME doesn’t have a formal and well defined policy in place about systemd. The rule of thumb is that GNOME doesn’t strictly depend on systemd for critical desktop functionality, but individual features may break without it.
OK, it still looks good, but wait until you read to this point:
Our automated testing infrastructure (i.e. GNOME OS) doesn’t test any non-systemd codepaths.
That’s a bold sentence to say in a world of free and open source world. “Free” as in “freedom”.
So what should distros without systemd do?
First, consider using GNOME with systemd.
No. I will not consider it. I would rather not using a computer than putting systemd on it.
You’re merely a desktop environment. How dare you demand how I should boot up my system?
I have never installed GNOME on my computer, and after reading this article, I never will.
You are free to write your software to be systemd-only. I am free to shut you out of my door forever.
I wish Void and other distros who do not use systemd at all, stop supporting GNOME 49 and onwards altogether, since now they are so hostile to non-systemd environments.
Yeah I remember reading that a while back.
As a gnome user who doesn’t even really care that much about my init system but loves void, what a crap way for them to answer that question.
That doesn’t fucking help me at all. I’m here cause I have a distro I like, presumably for actual reasons, and it doesn’t use sysd. I kinda like that it doesn’t use sysd. I just also wanna use the desktop I like. I really don’t think that’s unreasonable.
When they decided to depend on something exclusively because of its popularity, everything’s fucked. They are embracing one thing, and turning away from everything else. If there is an industrial standard, this mindset refuses to follow it. Where is mutual respect? Really, really horrible.
Thanks for that link, quite interesting. He does provide a lot more details. From what I can tell, it seems the Gnome 49 changes would basically require a couple of new services, but nothing too crazy (I might be wrong, maybe these are not actually that easy to set up). For Gnome 50 seems even more difficult, no idea if there is already something that replaces systemd userdb.
I wish Void and other distros who do not use systemd at all, stop supporting GNOME 49 and onwards altogether, since now they are so hostile to non-systemd environments.
I get your sentiment, but I would like to keep using Gnome on void, if possible.
