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Comment by danlitt | Hacker News Reader

FWIW GNOME can be used without systemd, and this is how Guix System does it. I think over time more and more components are depending on systemd, but at the current moment it is still feasible to swap them out for replacements that don't.

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Can it still? IIRC Guix still has GNOME 48 while GNOME said they'll be increasing they dependence on systemd after version 49 or 50[1]. I'd be happy if Guix can support future version as this seems like an end game distro for me, and I'm (slowly) looking into moving there but my understanding is I'd need to stay with KDE Plasma in the long-term.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1025560/

You are right, work on packaging GNOME 49 is still ongoing & may take a while (it is a hard job and not many people are working on it). It is not considered a dead end yet, as far as I can tell:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2026-02/msg001...

> my understanding is I'd need to stay with KDE Plasma in the long-term

Has KDE committed not to hard-depend on systemd in the future? I would be glad to discover that.

> gnome-session-shepherd

Very nice, hope they can get it working.

> Has KDE committed not to hard-depend on systemd in the future? I would be glad to discover that.

I was reading somewhere some KDE developers were saying that while some of the components (like plasma-login-manager) might depend on systemd, the core Plasma will not. They're the only major DE remaining on FreeBSD after all.

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